The best place to begin a discussion of what Horror of

Fang Rock is, is a quick rundown of what it is not. It’s

often referred to in terms of being the beginning of the
Williams era (which it is and isn’t, more later) or a
capstone to the Hinchcliffe era both thematically and
aesthetically (it isn’t). Just one more, not meaning to get
anyone’s back up, it must definitely isn’t a ‘classic’ In the
sense that stories like Inferno or Genesis of the Daleks
are.

It’s good. At times it transcends that and becomes

something greater, at times it plods and clearly lacks the
components to justify it's episode count. It’s a story
whipped along by fridge logic and a script that verges on
freneticism, aided by the committed performances of it's
guest cast, even if those characters are painted in rather
broad strokes. It’s main strengths are in the
performances of Baker and Jameson who show no on-
screen signs of the tumultuous goings on between them
off camera. It’s by no means a difficult story to like, but
by no means is it particularly relevant to what came
before or after it.
Horror of Fang Rock is an odd duck to say the least. It’s
been reviled by its stars (Louise Jameson did the fan
circuit rounds in the 1980s where she was less than
complimentary about the story, more later), it’s director
(who had a dreadful experience with Baker through
filming and was reticent about the Lighthouse setting)
and it’s writer who regarded it as only a semi-successful
rush-job.

Honestly this one is also odd in the way it was quietly

forgotten by fandom for a long time. I recall having a big
Peter Haining book as a kid which had all the stories up
to around Davison times listed somewhere in it. Probably
‘A Celebration’, though I could be wrong. Now, when
you’re ten and coming to grips with the idea that the
Doctor Who you’ve been enjoying on telly circa 1988-89
were the 25th and 26th seasons of a show that runs back
through generations of your family, there’s a fascination
in running through lists of previous seasons and
marvelling at facts like ‘Jon Pertwee never met the
Cybermen but he met the Daleks three times and Patrick
Troughton met the Daleks twice while notching up four
Cybermen stories’. Daleks and Cybermen. Then the
Master. Then the Ice Warriors, the Yeti and the
Sontarans.

I do recall as a kid reading that this was the one with a

Rutan. That was interesting. I had seen The Time Warrior
and The Sontaran Experiment by whatever point this was
and there’s a sly wink towards the Rutans in both stories.
So, this one was filed away Friends style as ‘The one with
the Rutan’. These days nothing needs to be filed away
when Daily Motion exists. All Doctor Who is easily
available now. Pick a platform. Drag a torrent in. Buy a
DVD or a digital download. Whatever your poison. But in
1989 the fact that there were seasons and seasons of
Who or that some stories were missing and so would
never be seen was an abstract matter. Revenge of the
Cybermen, Day of the Daleks and The Five Doctors
‘existed’ on a shelf in my room. To me, a story like Horror
of Fang Rock was as missing as the entirety of Marco
Polo in my childhood. The back catalogue of Who yet to
be transferred to VHS was seemingly as long as ten of my
adolescent arms and the release rate was glacial to day
the least. The one with the Rutans. Filed away in the
same way as ‘The first one with the Autons' or ‘The one
with the Silurians AND the Sea Devils’.
Due to John Nathan Turner's long running dismissive
attitude towards the Williams era, the release of Horror
of Fang Rock came post-TVM. In fact much of the
Williams era did. I think pre-TVM we saw City of Death,
Image of the Fendahl and... that’s it? Destiny of the
Daleks,? Torture for a kid who wants to see K-9 and has
only The Five Doctors to resort to. I’m pretty sure Key to
Time came out with the diamond logo and some dreary
Andrew Skilleter covers (I was an Alistair Pearson fan,
who wasn’t) but for some reason I never had any of
Season 16 on VHS. Probably I’d started getting into porno
and manga and Eurotrash. Nevertheless, for the longest
time the Williams era was hidden from view.

Still, you gotta start scraping the bottom of the barrel at

some point and when you’ve got all your existing Dalek,
Cybermen, Hinchcliffe and Pertwee stories out there
then you need to roll out things like The Space Museum,
The Time Monster or Underworld out. There was a sort
of sadness surrounding this kind of thing from around
1999 to 2000 - whatever. I remember shelling out cash
for that Master tin (part of a rather clever policy of
bundling lesser stories together that continued into the
DVD range, say “hi” to the K-9 and Company/The
Invisible Enemy boxset, carried home begrudgingly by
fans to be slotted on a shelf only out of a sense of
completeness.) and just sort of sitting through Colony in
Space and The Time Monster more out of duty than
anything else. There were gems in there like The
Gunfighters, but mostly for me, sitting through the latter
release schedule of the VHS range was a matter of
academic interest. It never got Twin Dilemma bad, but it
was still a matter of degrees. Buying a story on VHS in
those days was usually a case of forcing yourself through
stuff that came with a pre-loaded reputation of being
bad.

I can remember that Horror of Fang Rock shone in this

regard. It looked half decent, it was the right mix of scary
and funny and it had a monster which at least was sound
conceptually. I liked it then. I like it now. I just can’t bring
myself to love it.

It has huge positives. Let’s start with Baker who is acting

his dirty old socks off here. No surprise. Amidst
debilitating controversy, Hinchcliffe as been moved on,
Holmes was on his way out and Sladen was long gone.
There must have been a feeling within Baker that his
position was becoming at least a little tenuous and the
end-product is a candidate for his defining portrayal of
the Doctor. Baker is off-kilter throughout, delivering
comedy with gravitas and tension with levity. He owns
the part at this point, he’s completely in command of it
and the results are compelling. He’s ever so slightly
detached throughout, as alien as the Rutan. A man falling
from the top of the Lighthouse is ‘interesting' to him in
the same way the presence of a murderous alien
interloper is. Baker’s desire to subvert the wishes of BBC
higher ups determined to make the show less horrific
and more comedic are embraced by Baker on his own
terms and it’s a work of performative genius. Let’s be
clear, nobody (including Baker) owned the role as fully as
he does here pre-Fang Rock. Put simply, if someone
wanted a 101 on the character of the Doctor generally,
Horror of Fang Rock is a tour-de-force of a showcase.

Secondly there’s Jameson who gets great material

following her unfortunate and lacklustre treatment in
Talons. I mentioned she disliked this story for quite a
long time, believing it was a cast-off SJS story rushed into
service after a nascent version of State of Decay was
dropped for reasons that seem rather spurious from a
modern perspective. As Leela, she shares some of the
alien qualities exhibited by Baker and the scenes in which
the two of them are alone are electrical. Despite their
differences off-screen, I think Baker and Jameson sparkle
in front of the cameras, leading to comedic moments and
others which are genuinely touching, such as Leela's faith
in the Doctor and his power as a Time Lord or her proud
refutation of mysticism.