Doctor Who Is CLASSIC: Delta and the Bannermen

 It's time for...  Doctor Who Is CLASSIC! 

Today's post takes us back to November 1987 with Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Bonnie Langford as Mel.

Delta and the Bannermen

written by Malcolm Kohll

There's this alien woman named Delta.

There are these other aliens called the Bannermen who are trying to kill Delta.

The Doctor intervenes to save Delta.

The end.

Well, that is that for this edition of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC! 

...

...

Oh, you want more than that? 

What are you paying me for?

I don't get paid at all! 

...

...

Fine! Here we go...

Delta is Queen of the Chimerons but alas there is not much to be queen of. The Bannermen, led by the very cruel and single minded Gavrok, have terminated all of her people and aim to make it a complete 100% genocide with the death of their queen. 

Escaping with some kind of egg shaped thing, Delta seeks refuge with a holiday tour group.

The Navarinos, a race of shape-changing tourist aliens, are planning a visit to Disneyland on the planet Earth in 1959, in a spaceship disguised as an Volkswagen bus. Mel is on board as well while the Doctor follows along in the TARDIS. 

A chance encounter with an errant Earth satellite sends the tour bus to Wales and a holiday camp called Shangri-La.

Camp handyman Billy immediately becomes smitten with Delta much to the chagrin of Ray who has been trying to get Billy to notice she's a female woman of the opposite sex.  

The Doctor offers his sympathies to the heartbroken Ray but they find themselves targetted by a bounty hunter who is looking for Delta and isn't above killing the Doctor and Ray for sport.  

The bounty hunter stupidly tells the Bannermen where on Earth Delta is without getting paid first so Gavrok blows up the hapless hunter with a remote control thingy.

Meanwhile, Mel finds out Delta's egg like thingy is in fact an egg as it hatches a dark green blobby alien creature. 

The alien creature will not stay dark green and blobby for long, quickly evolving into a lighter green humanoid infant and then a toddler and then an adolescent.

Meanwhile, the Bannermen arrive and...

Yes, those fuckers

They blow up in the Navarinos in their Volkswagen space bus.

Well...

That seems a tad excessive. 

And there is a lot of running around as various parties including the Doctor and Ray and Mel and Billy and Delta and her child try to stay out of harm's way from an advancing Bannermen army.

The Doctor can't use the TARDIS because Gavrok has rigged it with a booby trap that will make anyone who approaches it to 'SPLODE!

And it works too!

Of course Gavrok stumbled into the TARDIS and he goes 'SPLODE!  

Billly gets alienfied so he can join Delta and her child as they head back into space. 

But not before Billy gives Ray his prize motorcycle. 

And the Doctor and Mel make their exit. 

Well, that was... something.  

Delta and the Bannermen clocks in at a slim 3 half hour episodes, is filled with dodgy special effects, tinny Casio keyboard music and a lot of frantic editing to make us think things are happening when they're not.  

There are some recognizable 1950's Pop tunes on the soundtrack:  

• "Rock Around the Clock"
• "Why Do Fools Fall in Love"
• "Mr. Sandman"
•  "That'll Be the Day"
• "Only You"
• "Lollipop"

If it seems off that a lot of time is spent with the character of Ray and her close interactions with the Doctor, Sara Griffiths as Ray was being considered as a potential new companion for the Doctor with Bonnie Langford having announced her intention to leave the role of Mel. 

Langford stuck around for one more story and would be replaced by Sophie Allred as Ace. Ray would have to settle for a parting gift: Billy's motorcycle. 

One character in the story is an excentric beekeeper named Goronwy who is very calm in the face of chaos, extraordinarily wise and insightful and not at all bothered by this alien invasion stuff.  Fans have speculated that Goronwy is a future version of the Doctor, a theory that Steven Moffat endorsed. Moffat wrote a line for the  Doctor about retiring to become a beekeeper in "The Name of the Doctor" in tribute to this story.  

The title Delta and the Bannermen was inspired by the 1980's British indie band "Echo and the Bunnymen.  

Delta and the Bannermen might be enjoyed as a funny and amusing piece of fluff but there is significant dissonance with the darker elements of the plot, the genocide of the Chimerons and blowing up the Navarinos in their Volkswagen space bus.

Delta and the Bannermen doesn't quite work for me, unable to quite address the dichotomy of it's existence. On one hand, it needed to be a darker, more serious tale to address the horrors and massive death inflicted by Gavrok and his Bannermen. On the other hand, the limits Doctor Who was under at the time for time, money and resources forces a sillier, lighthearted approach to the material.  

That is that for today's post. As the Doctor would have us do, remember to be good to one another.