| abstract
| - Fart To Doomsday was the second undistinguished serial of the diminished 19th season of the tarnished British science-fiction televisioned series Doctor OhBooWho, and was first timidly broadcast in four twice-weekly parts from 18–26 January 1982. Written by Terence Dudley (emphasis on the “dud”), the working title for this story was Mr. Toad’s Wrath. It was the first full full story filmed featuring the fetching Based Davison (“Bavison”) as the Fifth Doctor not covered in flour. This story was a replacement for an abandoned script called both Project Zeta Sigma, then Project 4G (apparently it wasn’t about fourth generation mobile telecommunications technology, but did still demonstrate their interest in putting the number four in a title), written by John Flanagan & Andrew McCulloch. That story was about a war between two planets actually fucking called the Doves and the Hawks, featured the Master posing as a scientist for the Hawks and was secretly, super secretly, a parable about nuclear disarmament; Superman 4 wasn’t made till 1987, so if completed, this story would have set Doctor Who as being ahead of it’s time, might have explained why they thought this would be a good idea for a story, and might have prevented the making of Superman 4 all in one go. Anyway, producer John Nathan-Turner dropped that script saying it was unworkable - pretty ironic, huh? JNT really is the gift that keeps on giving, providing more fractal layers of oh dear god why the deeper you look. It was wisely decided that after Castrovalva, the Doctor should only travel with two companions, so they were about to pitch Nyssa off the side in an earlier version of this story until Bavison argued to keep her around because he thought Nyssa “most suited to his vision of the Doctor," which translated means “she’s rather pleasing to look at,” even though he never got her to raise her arms above her head while wearing a tube-top like he did Tegan, ha ha! Man I wished someone had filmed that. Anyway, John Nathan-Turnout and the rest of the production team logically decided to her on but somehow failed to logically use this as an excuse to throw Adric out instead, WTF? Nyssa kinda hadn’t been written into the next story Kinda, so they just said she was “resting in the TARDIS,” set up by her collapsing at the end of this story due to sexual exhaustion. Terence Dudley somehow managed to make something good while directing Tom Baker’s Meglos but failed to make anything good when he wrote this, Black Orchid, and The King's Demons. Bavison didn’t like his work much, especially Black Orchid, if you listen to the commentary track for that one, which comes as no surprise. What does surprise is that Dudley Don’twrite almost (re)wrote the script for the very first Doctor Who ever, An Unearthly Child, but turned down the job. Much like Fivey himself, this story is neither here nor there, bad nor awful, painful nor worth celebrating. You can easily find worse and better and even more generically bland that this one. When the usual sources can’t find much of interest to say about what was happening behind the scenes (“Janet Fielding hauled off and punched Matthew Waterhouse on-set,” “the monster was made of used Dixie cups found in the canteen rubbish bin”), this should tell you something. With that in mind, let me now waste over four thousand words telling you about it.
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