The Nose of Evil

Ninety-First Entry in the Charles Daniels Unauthorized Programme Guide
O' Nostrilomo

Serial 4Q - The Nose Of Evil -

 The TARDIS arrives on a planet no one has bothered to name, so the
Doctor decides to honour it with the specification "Hellhole".  Hellhole
is the home of a tribe of leather clad savages, The Sexyteem.  The
Sexyteem
worship a strange god named Xerox.  Xerox speaks to them through their
shaman, Bill Proud Wearer of The Mighty Glove Hat, or Glovehat for short.
Glovehat has long dreamed of finding a way through a deadly barrier into
the forbidden zone, which is controlled by the Tetch.  Luckily, the Doctor
carries a generic "Forbidden Zone Pass" which eeriely tends to work in
these situations even though he bought it in the same novelty shoppe
where he acquired a whimsical Area 51 Top Secret Clearance Pass.
 The Doctor discovers that his face is also the face of the Evil One -
called that affectionately by passerbys who pelt him with huge stones
and make him face some rather silly leech creatures in a pit of doom
and despair.  The Doctor is somewhat disappointed in savages who actually
keep pits of certain death and doom around as they tend not to work and
betray the savages rather limited intelligence.  In fact all the Doctor
has to do to defeat "The Test of the Horda" is not to jump into the
pit and try to mind meld with the hostile creatures.  Instead the Doctor
merely waits for the savages to become bored with the inept torture and
let him free.
  The Doctor searches deep inside the forbidden zone and finds a massive
carving of his face on a cliff.  At first the Doctor is horrified by
the huge nose on the carving but he is appalled to even greater depths
when he discovers the scale to his own face is entirely accurate in
every possible detail.  The Doctor speculates that someone, perhaps
himself, had made some ill-fated attempt to turn him into a theme
park, and that the cliff face might represent the remains of some
incredibly bitchin' and scary mountain rollercoaster ride.
   Inevitably the Doctor decides he should investigate it with the
one villager naive enough to believe he is good and of no danger to
anyone, Leela.  Leela has been cast from the tribe for questioning
the fashion sense of Xerox and indeed any god that would make his
high priest wear silly glovehats.
   Together they climb into the carving's giantic stone nose and
deep into the Doctor's sinus cavity.  Inside the depths of the
mountain they find Xerox, a super-computer, which arrived on the
planet when a space craft full of leather clad bondage freaks crashed
on Hellhole ages ago.  Some of the ship's crew were suppose to scout
out the planet for exciting out door settings, but then the Doctor
arrived on an earlier visit to chat them all up for kinky fun.
When they all flatly turned him down and humilated him he decided to
get his revenge by remaining with them for the rest of the trip -
but in personality, not in person.  The Doctor hooked his mind up
to their total mind control computer, Xerox, and copied his own
mental print into every segment of the device.  This unfortunately
made the computer as totally insane as the Doctor himself!
The computer, entirely unable to do anything physical with the crew,
freaked out in a really bad "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" Harlan
Ellison kinda' way.
  Xerox then arranged for the crew to be split up: the assholes and
total jerks, the tetchy members of the crew, became the Tetch, and
Sexy Team Sixty-Nine became The Sexyteem.  Xerox began an experiment
raising the Tetch as super opinionated telepaths who carried around
their brains in glass jars, while allowing the Sexyteem to wear silly
hats with gloves on them and having a mighty good laugh at them for it.
  The Doctor has a nice chat with himself and decides that he's a pretty
alright guy.  He insists that Xerox have lots of fun manipulating these
people and offers a few suggestions.  After a casual dinner and lengthy
discussion about the merits of bean bag chairs and scatter cushions
the Doctor decides to leave this copy of himself behind to run amok
all it likes.
  Leela, deciding that she doesn't want to live in a Hellhole, pushes
her way into the TARDIS.  The Doctor is somewhat upset to have a new
companion to look after, but is grateful at least this one kills first
and asks questions later.

Book(s)/Other Related - Doctor Who Savage Lust Orgy Party (Canada Only)
                        Doctor Mysterio Leatherro Domino Spectularrrrr

                        "Infest Me Sexual Mind Worms!!  INFEST ME!!!!!
                        One Man's Love Of Hormonal Parasites, (Chapter 1
                        All Those Women on Doctor Who)."

Fluffs - Tom Baker seemed godlike for most of this story

Fashion Victims - Wearing cricket gloves on your head brings you closer
                  to god?

Goofs - Leela can't pronounce "testicular electrodes" ('elect-trudes')
        on film but she CAN when she's shot on video!
        Leela shoots a Tetchy Guard with his own gun, yet in the
        next scene she picks it up next to his dead body and doesn't
        know how it works - resulting in a hilarious scene in which
        the Doctor absently mindedly explains how it works by example -

        [Pointing the in no direction in particular]

        "See you pick it up and pull the trigger one,"

        [A guard turns around the corner just in time to get zapped!
        He immediately falls to his knees.  The Doctor continues his
        lecture obliviously]

        "two,"

        [Another laser zap and a loud "UGGGGGHHHHHH!" from the guard]

        "three times."

        [A loud zap! The guard slumps down]

        "Like so!"

        [The Doctor hands back the gun and looks confused at a dead
        guard at his feet]

        "What happened to that fellow?"


Technobabble - The TARDIS displays nextialserialis discontinuity
               Xerox is "multi-media-manic"

Links and References -
The Doctor is trying to reach Hyde Park, again mistaking it for
"a good Hyding Place".

Untelevised Misadventures -
The Doctor's first encounter with the Sexy Team and the strange
computer!!  Why is this missing?!?!?!?!?!  Think of it, a race
of leather bound perverts and they are in space trying to find
exotic worlds to have kinky wild...umm...damn!

Dialogue Disasters -

Leela: Why do you think it is evil?
Doctor: I have a nose for these things.

Dialogue Triumphs -

Leela: The Evil One!
Doctor: Oh, have we met before?

Doctor: Would you like a jelly baby?
Leela: It's true then!  They say the evil one eats babies.
Doctor: Not the cute ones!

Doctor: Now drop your pants and I'll thrill you with my deadly jelly
        baby!
Leela; What a pathetic chat up line!
Doctor: Worked for Felicity Kendall.

Doctor: You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing
        in common.
Leela: What's that?
Doctor: They're BBC executives.

Doctor: As Rassilon said, "Don't alter your clothes to fit the weather!
        Alter the weather to fit your clothes!"
Leela: Can you do that?
Doctor: Yes, I COULD.  In actuality though I'm far too lazy too.
        I mean it's so much easier to put on a warm jacket.

Doctor: You can't expect perfection from me!  Well you could, but you'd
        be miserably disappointed in the end!

Doctor: An omniscient computer with schizophrenia...YES!  IT IS ME!

Dialogue Oddities -

(ORIGINAL SCRIPT)
The Doctor: Evil.  Pure evil.  It must be stopped.  Xerox must die.

(ON SCREEN)
Tom Baker: I say, he seems like a charming chap to me.  Let's leave
           him to it then!

Viewers' Quotes -

"Doctor Who may not be the most original show on television.  They
rip off people and plagarise so much material it's rather disgusting.
Still as long as they steal from the most depraved and disturbing sources
Doctor Who will have my full support!"  - Monkey Molesting Monthly (1978)

"Leather, depravity, men climbing into their own noses for christsakes!
This reeks of the devil's hand!  I say, this is the best damn show on
the television!"  - Father James O' Maley (1977)

"The first thing I noticed about Leela was her lack of clothing,
which I later discovered was noticed by millions of others as well.
She must have been very cold for a savage.  You think savages would
dress all warm and snuggly in cheetah fur bras and tight leather trousers.
You know, something sensible."  - Kinky Fashion InZine (1979)

"You wouldn't catch a Quirk in such sparse clothing!  There was an
alien menace with some moral fortitude!" - Creator of the Quirks (1980)

"Again a story to show us what Doctor Who is all about - bondage...
to the machine, or whatever."  - Charles Daniels (2000)

Psychotic Nostalgia -
"Finally!  A girl I could hunt and gut deer with!  My dream girl!"

Tom Baker Speaks!

"Louise Jameson!  That was a very interesting time.  She kept falling
out of her clothes in a way that would seen very natural in the adult
entertainment industry but which I felt at the time to be strange for
Doctor Who.  At first I thought to myself 'Doctor,' I thought 'Doctor,'
I repeated to myself 'You are a child's hero!  Should you really be
seen travelling the cosmos with a half naked savage woman?'. I thought
about what all the children would think of their hero with this half
naked lady, and then I thought back and remembered that I was a
teenagers, adolescent, hero as well.  I was a hero for all ages.
A hero for all seasons.  And so, when I saved the universe, I was
a hero to the children.  And when I had Leela in the TARDIS, dressed
in mere scraps and hints of leather, then I was a hero to all the
men sixteen to forty-five!"

Rumors & Facts -

 This story was at one point to have been called The Day God Got Pissy,
which is not a bad title except that the production team worried about
the implication that Tom Baker would be god in that line of reasoning.
No one wished to further Tom Baker's already sizeable ego, so the
story was abruptly changed into a poke at Tom's nose.  This was to
offer some humility in the role, as many BBC employees were somewhat
tired of Mr. Baker's regular routine of walking into the cafeteria
dressed as Rasputin and demanding that he could heal the sick, the
wicked, and the infirm, so the least they could do was give him a
damn free lunch.

 This story offered plenty of disturbing images in the boost of
Tom Baker's self-esteem - particularly at the end of Part Three in
what must rate as one of the strangest and most unsettling of the
series' cliffhangers. The only face ever associated with Xerox
is the Doctor's own face, and the sequence in which the Sexyteem battle
huge roaring images of it and are forced to watch what it likes to do
with over ripe melons is quite disturbing.

 What I have always found personally disturbing is the stupidity of
the concept in one respect - everyone believes that Xerox is god,
the creator of all.  They also believe that he is trapped behind
a wall and they need to rescue him.  Now having all powerful deities
trapped inside of something and needing to be rescued doesn't make
sense - that's not good writing, that's Star Trek V.

 By far the most memorable of the Sexyteem is, naturally enough,
Leela, a primitive but scantily clad young woman who, for no apparent
reason, decides to go off with the Doctor at the story's conclusion.
It is events like this one in Doctor Who that make me wonder why
these things never happen to me!  Leather clad women with big knives
never decide to randomly jump into the passenger's side of my car.
The convenient coincidence of someone wanting to join the Doctor on
his travels just after his last companion has parted from him really
pisses me off as well.  Why is it that whenever he gets dumped or
he dumps someone. he's got another one lined up?  Do you know how
long *I* have to wait between relationships?  I guess it's the time
machine.  Maybe the TARDIS just pilots him towards other people on
the rebound.  This is a unique and very important unexplored facet
of TARDIS technology if you ask me.  How does it know when and where
free willing available women will be so willing to leap into it?

 Okay, I'll stop my ranting temporarily and give you all some
background information.  In early 1975, a drunken scriptwriter
named Chris Butcher - whose credits to date had mostly been in comedy
or at least comically awful drama - submitted a proposal entitled
The Silent Shag to the Doctor Who production office. Although this
was rejected as total and utter crap, it did result in a meeting
between Butcher, producer Philip Pinchcliffe, and script editor Sherlock
Holmes who desperately wanted to meet the writer of the appalling
treatment and have a bit of a laugh at him.  Holmes suggested Butcher
try his hand at developing a story which wasn't total and utter tripe.
Butcher made two different attempts at this, The Dreamers Of Falcon Dos
and The Meat Conspiracy, but neither met with approval (the latter was
burnt in disgust at a board meeting on October 30th, 1975).

 At this point, Pinchcliffe suggested that Butcher change his setting
from his apartment in Surrey (as was the case for both of his original
efforts) to any other goddamn location in the world. He also came up
with the central motif of an enormous carving of the Doctor's face.
With this in mind, Butcher wrote a new synopsis called The Tower Next
To My Apartment In Surrey, which was sent back with death threats and
for further development around January 1976.

By April, the serial's title had been changed to The Day God Got Pissy.
Holmes had asked Butcher to identify a character with a personality
in his script and when he totally failed to be able to do so it was
re-written entirely again.  While this was going on Sarah Jane Smith
was leaving Doctor Who and all the scripts up to that point had included
her.  Really at this point I wonder why the hell they didn't drop this
entire line of thought with Butcher as it had resulted in utter crap
up to this point.  Instead of dropping it, they decided to let Butcher
create a new companion for the Doctor!  Showing that the BBC is truly
deranged and sadistic.

"Well Sherlock, sure he's sent the same script idea in seventeen times,
and it's been hideous every single time.  However at least it's no
longer all set in his flat!  Did you read the latest copy?  We get
to go all the way to the tobacconist and that's a good five blocks
away."

"Even though he's obviously improved.  Should we really let him
write and design the new companion?"

"Well we have to let him.  Otherwise we'll have to do it."

"Good point.  Buy you a round at the pub?"


  Butcher first thought a companion named Cat Molester Jones was
appropriate. Later, though, it was decided that beyond being Welsh
and having a strange propensity for molesting cats, the character
didn't have the depth one expected of a companion.   When Terry Jones
heard the character would not be cast as a regular companion he
was apparently heart broken.
 Butcher, Holmes, and Pinchcliffe decided a female character
would be better and sexier in savage clothing.  They looked through
countless copies of different versions of the scripts and discovered
the warrior Leela - who had been a part of Butcher's The Cat Molesting
Conspiracy submission.  They augmented her role to companion status
instead of the character originally to be played by Terry Jones.
Leela was envisaged by Butcher as a mix of Emma Peel from The Avengers
and the Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled, who also inspired her name.
Pinchcliffe quickly grew to like the character, and so Butcher was asked
to write two different endings, one where Leela is briefly nude in the
TARDIS with the Doctor and one where she stays nude for an incredibly
gratuitous amount of time. Shortly thereafter, the decision was made
by Pinchcliffe that he would retain both versions at his home for
further review.  Due to Pinchcliffe's wild enthusiasm for both of
Butcher's nudity scripts, Butcher was given the opportunity to write
the next Doctor Who story as well.

 Because she would be around for more than just a single serial,
Holmes cast about for ways to make Leela a more substantial
character. He suggested she possess some sort of supernatural powers
or have some mystic connection with the universe that caused her to
not be very keen on clothing.  Butcher preferred that she have a sort
of sixth sense for danger which made her want to be quick, deadly,
and unencumbered by restricting garments.

 No location filming could be afforded for The Nose Of Evil; ironically
all film work was done in Butcher's apartment after all.