Season three begins with a female revolution...

Part of my website is an occasional set of TV reviews (I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Masterchef’s going to be next on the menu). One recent Saturday, me and my wife, hemmed in at home with only flu and snow for company were stuck with the telly. One of the programmes was so wretched that it prompted me to write a review – yes, the terrifying Take Me Out, in which an embarrassed-looking Paddy McGuinness presided over a clutch of hapless blokes trying to win over a gaggle of shrieking harridans.

Anyway, to cut a long story short (too late), the aim of the game was for the men to try and win at least one date, something that hardly happened, since they’d get ripped to shreds by the highly critical females, who’d switch off their booth lights with a metaphorical nyer-nyer-nyer-nyer-nyer.

All that power, it’s frightening. The women in Galaxy Four have this sort of power, too. The Drahvins are a slightly more restrained version of the Take Me Out coven, but they neatly sum up the main moral message of Galaxy Four, which is “Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover”.

"The Rills are painted as the baddies of the piece, and about as good looking as Plug from The Bash Street Kids"

The Doctor and co. have touched down on a creepy planet that’s actually about to go ka-boom in 14 planetary cycles. The planet’s inhabited by two races – the Drahvins and the Rills. The former’s spacecraft is all but useless, while the Rills’ crashed wreckage could be made to fly again.

Of course, the Drahvins use their feminine wiles to try and win over The Doctor, Vicki and Steven in their desperate bid to take over the Rill spacecraft. The Rills are painted as the baddies of the piece, and about as good looking as Plug from The Bash Street Kids. But what do you know, the Rills turn out to be the goodies, while the Drahvins well and truly went over to the dark side when Darth Vader was still in nappies and teething on rusks.

It’s not quite as easy to take the Drahvins so seriously these days. For one thing they’ve dated faster than a UK Gold schedule, with their 1960s haircuts and costumes that look like they were intended for the fag ash, blue rinse cleaning staff at the BBC studios. Presumably there’s a dog-eared calendar sitting around a dusty BBC office of the Drahvins posing suggestively with their guns and the Chumblies.

Ah, the Chumblies, silly robot pets of the Rills. They look like a set of salad bowls on wheels and make irritating squeaky, bleepy noises. Imagine those naff “Whassssaaappp!” adverts from yonks ago played over and over: that’s what the Chumblies are like in Galaxy Four.

The small cast allows for the regulars to take more of a central role. And they’re as strong as ever. It’s jarring to see Hartnell’s Doctor be momentarily won over by the Drahvins and doubtful of the Rills’ true potential, since he’s always the champion of the underdog. It’s left to Vicki and Steven to provide the distrust of the Drahvins, especially Vicki. A neat about-face is that traditionally, it’s the female companion that gets locked up. However, in this case, it’s Steven that gets to be the Drahvins’ pet chimp. Despite this, both companions continue to work well together – I also like the way in which Vicki gives Steven a haircut at the start of the story. Vicki’s Haircuts would have gone down far better than Susan’s, especially when the latter gets possessed by an unseen alien entity.

"There’s some deeper food for thought at work in Galaxy Four..."

Galaxy Four is quite sophisticated for the time, and carries on a grown-up streak in the show. For a supposed kids’ show, Doctor Who was actually anything but, as stories like The Aztecs and The Crusade have demonstrated. There’s some deeper food for thought at work in Galaxy Four, with references to cloning (the identical Drahvins) and also the way in which the menfolk are treated as no more than breeding battery hens). It’s all intelligently thought out and reasoned by former English teacher William Emms, and echoes shades of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and in some respects, pre-empts grim Margaret Attwood novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

The only downside of this maturity is that the action tends to drag in places, especially in the middle two instalments. Part of the problem is that there is really only one guest character, and that’s Maaga, the principal Drahvin (well acted by Stephanie Bidmead). The other characters are drone Drahvins, and the benign Rills, but they’re not really characters in their own right. Similarly, the concept of the piece doesn’t make for gripping drama, since it’s blatantly obvious that the Drahvins will be consigned to a fiery inferno on the planet, while the Rills manage to get away scot-free.

From a personal point of view, it’s hard to get a real handle on Galaxy Four, since none of the episodes exist in the BBC archives. The third, fourth and fifth seasons of Doctor Who really took a battering when it came to the mass junkings. So I’ve no idea how well the visuals match the script – still photos give an idea of what’s going on, but they don’t tell the whole story. With that in mind, I can’t really comment on Derek Martinus, who makes his directorial debut with this story. Judging from the short clip on the Lost In Time DVD, the story actually looks quite good, well designed and well acted, even if the Chumbley robot looks as daft as a brush.

Galaxy Four, despite its dramatic deficiencies, makes for a good start to the third season, and demonstrates an ever-growing commitment to the more adult audience that the production team were striving for. But what's happening next? No Doctor? It can only mean one thing: The first ever Doctor-lite episode...

John Bensalhia limbered up for this mammoth task with a full four-series review of Blake's 7, and writes professionally and recreationally all over the web. Check out his portfolio of work at Wordprofectors.

Check out John's previous Doctor Who review, The Time Meddler