'Doctor Who: Paradise Towers' (1987)



It's back! Maybe only temporarily but it's back... I've been able to get back to mine and pick up a couple of DVDs as well as order a couple more so there will be a few more 'Classic Doctor Who' posts here, for a little while at least...
So, where should we kick off again? How about nineteen eighty seven, a time when I had only just started high school and childish naivety was telling me that this was a good thing. A time when one of my teatime shows would have been 'Paradise Towers'...

Looking for a decent swimming pool (because when you have the whole of time and space to travel through, of course that's what you'd be looking for...) the Doctor and Mel land in Paradise Towers, a luxurious block of flats that has fallen into disrepair and anarchy. The Kangs roam the corridors, the caretakers try to stop them and if a 'rezzie' asks you round for dinner, don't go...
But why are the robotic cleaners suddenly killing everybody? What is lurking in the basement? And will Mel get her swim...? The Doctor is about to be caught in a fight for his life but he'd rather do that than go swimming...

When I was a kid, 'Doctor Who' more or less got a free pass in terms of what I'd let a serial get away with. It could be awful but it was 'Doctor Who' and that was all that mattered to me. These days, I at least try to be a little more critical about what I watch and nostalgia isn't a mitigating factor. With that in mind, I watched 'Paradise Towers' and while I liked the concept, bloody hell it's irritating.

I'm as big a fan of 'near future luxury descended into anarchy' as the next geek and 'Paradise Towers' has plenty of that with some lovely dark and rundown corridors where those creepy robot cleaners prey on the unwary. I like the idea of cannibal residents as well, 'Paradise Towers' is actually a very dark story if you give it a chance. I'm also really starting to get into Sylvester McCoy's 'funny Doctor hiding a sterner edge' as well; give it a couple of episodes to come out naturally and it really works. I'm still not too sure about Mel, right now, but at least she found her swimming pool, even if it had a killer robot hiding at the bottom of it.

Unfortunately, it's really difficult to give 'Paradise Towers' a chance when Richard Briers is so bloody annoying as the Chief Caretaker. The Kangs are bad enough (if I hear 'cowardly cutlet' one more time... I get that a lot has been forgotten but this was ridiculous and not in the good way) but Briers' 'possessed Chief Caretaker' was just awful and took a lot away from what the other actors had put into the story in order to make it work. Watching Briers lurch down corridors, putting on a silly voice, was not how 'Paradise Towers' needed to end, even if Howard Cooke's 'Pex' finally got a chance to redeem himself at the end (which saved the story for me, there's a little Pex in all of us).

'Paradise Towers' could have been very good if it hadn't been for Richard Briers overdoing it and chewing scenery that really didn't need to chewed at all. What could have been a very dark and claustrophobic piece ends up being 'okay, but...'
You can't win them all and there are plenty of other 'Classic Who' stories to watch so back on the DVD shelf this one goes and it's on to the next one. Which is...

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