"The Leisure Hive" is the first Doctor Who of the 1980s. Much of it is similar to what's gone before - Tom Baker is the Doctor, Lalla Ward is there as Romana, and John Leeson returns to voice K9; David Fisher, contributor to four stories from Seasons 16 and 17, is the writer, and the baddies have an obvious parallel with the Mafia, right down to having an anagrammatical name; the basic storyline sees our heroes turning up on a planet to find all is not well, and battling monsters.

Considering that this story, given this, could have slotted easily into one of Graham Williams' series without any major scripting changes, it's remarkable how fresh "The Leisure Hive" feels. Everything seems revitalised - both Tom and Lalla had become ever so slightly lazy by the end of Season 17, but here their performances are sharp and magnetic. While how much darker the Fourth Doctor becomes for Season 18 is ludicrously exaggerated (until the Watcher turns up in "Logopolis" he's pretty much the same as he's been in most of his appearances before Season 17), Baker certainly seems to be working that much harder. The sense of humour is still there (note his hapless attempts to charm his way past Mena while under trial for the murder of Stimson), as is the façade of the Doctor being a bit of a clown, but Baker isn't falling over every five minutes and being allowed to seemingly improvise whole chunks of dialogue. The new production team draw one of his best performances out of him here.

Romana also receives some wonderful writing here, really being able to show her scientific knowledge. Lalla Ward showed considerable adeptness at playing it straight to Baker's funnyman in Season 17, but she shows she can take Baker on at proper acting too. K9's barely in it... knocking him out in the opening sequence is a difficult one to judge... On the one hand it does make both the character and Romana seem a little stupid, but on the other I'm really not that keen on K9, so I can let that go.

Of course, what really makes the difference on "The Leisure Hive" is the gorgeous, swaggering direction of Lovett Bickford. Graeme Harper is often said to be the first director to really stamp his presence all over a Doctor Who story, but the real credit should go to Bickford. While Who's budget was never going to let the thing look like a film, but through Bickford's painstaking approach it certainly feels like a film. The most pedestrian scenes are enriched by his artistic touches. There's no other story that could get away with a pedestrian pan over a windswept Brighton beach, and his sheer verve masks several minor scripting problems - that the Doctor and Romana miss the faked test of Hardin's machine, or that the Foamasi can't possibly use skin suits to pass as humans are swept away by the slick, confident direction. The ending of the first episode is a gloriously choreographed piece of work, complete with the Doctor's scream blending into the closing music.

It's helped by several factors. The guest cast are uniformly excellent. Laurence Payne gives the best of his performances for the series as Morix, while the splendid Adrienne Corri manages to imbue Mena with a great mixture of dignity and vulnerability. David Haig manages to make Pangol utterly chilling, while Nigel Lambert perfectly puts across the character of Hardin,a man full of good intentions, but forced into the wrong way of bringing them about.

The script is a little muddled... I'm no scientist, which means Bidmead's more scientific terminology (well, more scientific as far as I know, anyway) is still just technobabble, the main difference from Douglas Adams is that it doesn't sound so silly. There's a bit too much of it in "The Leisure Hive" to make it enjoyable, and it leads to a few dull, talky scenes. The basic nuclear fallout idea is sound, while the touches such as the Argolins being sterile and the idea of a race of monsters having a subversive sect among them are nice touches that make the Argolins and Foamasi feel like alien races with their own cultures and history, as opposed to two groups of actors in costumes.

It all adds up to rather a glorious season opener. It has it's faults, but it's a competent story with gorgeous, flashy direction and strong performances. A recommended appetiser for those new to Doctor Who, and something of a neglected gem to the rest of us.

Review written: 12/05/2005
"The Leisure Hive" DVD @ Amazon.co.uk