8th Doctor - Hothouse (ii)

Book(s)/Other Related -
Dr Who & The Thirteen Mystical Bobos
Hazell Takes Up Gardening
Neil’s Heavy Concept Album (1984)


Fluffs – Paul McGann seemed green with envy in this story.

"Hello, Neil. I’m your Fairy Godmother. And I’ve come to shop you to the police. You dirty little bastard. Even the snail leaves a stardust trail..."

"Oh, wow! What a horrible dream I just had! We sew the seed! Then nature grows the seed! And then we-AaaRRGHHHH!!!"


Goofs –
In The Seeds of Bloom it’s clearly established that Krynoid plant men require incredible amounts of curry and Naan bread. Surely, therefore, all Neil’s Krynoid mutants would be wanting so much curry that all the curry houses in the area would have been doing better business than ever before! But here, they are dying out from lack of customers who go after health food! How does that make sense? More to the point, considering how massively ripped-off this story is from the original, why did no one actually notice that massive plot point?!?


Fashion Victims -
Neil’s red Indian headband, cowboy vest, camouflage trousers and ankh-necklace are bad enough... but why did he make it the official uniform for all Brothers of the Soil Commune members?!

"Oh my god, what is up with that hair?"
"Don’t bring me down and hassle me, Lucie!"
"I’ve been all over the universe and seen lots of crazy things but that hair is truly unnatural! It is grotesque, but I cannot look away... Is it Bryl Cream? Grecian formula gone bad? A genetic joke?"
"Hah fucking hah, Miss Miller."
"Those funky follicles... pulling me in... I wonder, if you were disemboweled but that hair was put on life support, would anyone really notice?"


Technobabble -
"Hello, vegetables! This is Neil here, right, um, look, I don’t wanna spoil the magic, right, but I just wanted to say the whole thing of growing Krynoids was quite a lot of hassle, right? And it didn’t turn out like I expected at all. I mean, there’s much too much technology and reversing the polarity of the chlorophyll flow involved, right?"


Links and References -
This story molests the ancient corpse of the 1976 story "The Seeds of Bloom". Did you spot that at all? It’s very subtle, I know, so I thought it might merit being spelt out for those who have yet to notice this blindingly, painfully obvious fact.


Untelevised Misadventures -
The infamous 1973 UNIT Christmas Party (you know, the one where the Bastard ended his war on all mankind to play the Genie in the UNIT panto of Aladdin) was attended by James Hazell, Bernard Quatermass, Emma Peel, Arthur Daley, Twiggy, Suzi Quatro with DJ duties performed by a hairy fanged jellyfish Medusoid from the Horsehead Nebula.


Groovy DVD Extras -
The original TV story The Seeds of Bloom starring Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen. It’s just the same as the main story, but visible, better acted and with a halfway-decent Doctor in the role. Optional commentary by a potted rubber plant and a Viking called Eric.


Dialogue Disasters –

Maitre D’: Any tip?
Hazell: Yes. Never throw a pot at 78 rpm on your record player.


Lucie: Fate spins its question-mark pullover of confusion once more!
Doctor: ...shut up, Lucie.


Neil: Have you ever wondered what life’s heaviest bummers have in common? Like why are there fewer and fewer black fruit gums every year and more and more horrid orange ones? Or why policemen walk differently from anyone else? Or why Paul McCartney’s next collaboration is going to be with Kenny Lynch? Or why George Harrison has got a Jacuzzi? Or why people suddenly stopped laughing at Elton John and started taking him seriously? Or why they killed off, like, EVERYONE at the end of Blake’s Seven?
Maitre D’: The Breadhead Conspiracy?
Neil: The answer is one of the heaviest trips you can imagine, it’s called the – hey, you guessed!
Maitre D’: It was just a wild stab in the dark.
Neil: Really?
Maitre D’: You tell me this EVERY FUCKING NIGHT!


Doctor: Lucie, there are always choices to be made. I’d almost forgotten how adept you are at making the wrong ones. It’s almost as if you have no capacity to learn from your past mistakes!
Lucie: You don’t know what yer talking about, mate!
Doctor: Lucie, take right now for instance, you’re not even pointing a GUN at us, you’re just making a gun shape with your fingers!
Lucie: Oh. Right. Bugger.
Doctor: I despair. I really do.


Neil: Oh man, something really heavy has just happened! Really heavy! Really-really-really-really-really HEAVY! H-E-A-V-Y! The most negative vibe in Vibesville, the lead vocalist of bummers, the King Crimson of the Hassle Brigade! It’s almost too heavy for words!
Lucie: WHAT is?
Neil: ...oh, wow, I like totally forgot!


Doctor: Stupid, stupid, stupid! I knew this would happen! I should never have left her alive! And now...
Hazell: ...now?
Doctor: Now she’ll plague me for another two episodes at the very least!


Dialogue Triumphs -

Doctor: Fauna to flora. Funk to funky. We know Major Tom’s a junkie.


Neil: Yeah, the Lords of Existence made the world into the burnt-out urband decay sort of place that it is! They can really be total bastards! We are mere powerless creeps against the power of the fucking Lords of Existence who move in mysterious ways and more often than not go out of their way to make sure I have a really bad time!
Hazell: Oh give it a rest! I don’t want to get aggravation about how crap your life is! Do something about it!
Neil: ...I hate you, Lords of Existence! I hope you die, OK?
Hazell: You’re just going to spend the rest of your life blaming celestial forces for the fact you can’t be bothered to cheer up?
Neil: That AND destroy the system!
Hazell: And how are you going to do that then, squire?
Neil: I’m not sure. Why does everyone hate me?
Hazell: Ask yourself why anyone would want to LIKE you.


Lucie: Let’s go then.
Doctor: We can’t leave! No one else is going to come along to sort the problem out - we’re the last hope for this planet!
Lucie: Will there be explosions?
Doctor: In abundance.
Lucie: Brutal!
Doctor: DAMN IT, I JUST LOVE PYROMANIA!!!


Neil: Hey, Doc, I need your help man. Not just me, the birds, the trees, the joyous overflowing infinite beauty of oneness, big Rizla greens, the pyramids, Glastonbury, Dr Strangely Strange, the hills, the waves, the universe... everything except bogies!
Doctor: Uh huh...
Neil: People never listen to me and they’re going to feel really bad when my totally beautiful mind opens the departure gates of reality, where there are no security guards of perception, no hassles at the customs check of earthly desires and we can all float freely up the steps of illusion onto that other plane.
Doctor: Are you have seizure?! SPEAK ENGLISH!


Lucie: So...
Doctor: So?
Lucie: Back to the TARDIS?
Doctor: I suppose so. Anywhere you want me to drop you off or shall I just leave you here?
Lucie: You offering me a lift?
Doctor: Yeah, why not? After all, YOU are the one who came crawling back and begging for my help. (examines fingernails) I can afford to be generous, I can.
Lucie: Oh, and what are YOU going to do then? Go back to shagging mermaids? Break the laws of time? Go back and put it all right?
Doctor: You seem angry. Is it because I’m demonstrating my emotional maturity so effectively?
Lucie: OK, you smug bastard, I WANT TO COME WITH YOU! IN THE TARDIS!
Doctor: My God.
Lucie: I liked it!
Doctor: You’re actually able to retain information in your brain for more than five minutes! AND you’re behaving halfway reasonable for once! I’m honestly not sure which surprises me more!
Lucie: I suppose it won’t be the same...
Doctor: But nothing’s EVER the same, Lucie Miller. Not for more than two seasons at most. Everything’s always brand new to keep the audience interested! Every day! This is what keeps me going, the idea that sooner or later you’ll sod off and never come back... or at least stop being a massive bitch. Which you seem to. Well, maybe not the "massive" bit. Yeah, you can actually be my companion for once instead of monumentally annoying guest star. Deal?
Lucie: Deal!
Doctor: Good.
Lucie: What is? Who are you anyway?
(long pause)
Doctor: ...oh no, not again...


Neil: I’m going through a bit of a depression at the moment, and frankly, the whole world can just, like, you know, DIE! Who wants a planet full of people who criticize my flares as unfashionable spazmo clothing, or slam my head in the fridge door, and scratch my Grateful Dead records for a joke, or biro "MEAT EATER" on my forehead the night before an animal rights meeting. That’ll teach the human race to superglue cornflakes round my mouth and accuse me of having herpes, won’t it?


UnQuotable Quote -
Lucie: Become a grower. Become a groover. Become a gardener. Go green... BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY! PAY FOR IT, IF YOU HAVE TO!!


Viewer Quotes -

"Global warming is all Neil’s fault because he’s such a lazy, tight-fisted health-risk and anyway Neil there’s three of us and we’ve voted already that it’s NEIL’S fault! Or don’t you believe in democracy Neil? I suppose you’d rather be living in Nazi Germany and forcing the working class to deal with climate change for you, wouldn’t you? Well, I’ve got news for you Herr Neil Goeballs – we won the war forty years ago so shut up! GOD HE MAKES ME BAITY!" – Conrad Westmaas (2009)

"I enjoyed this a lot thanks to a gorgeous sexy cast, I particularly
enjoyed the part where Lucie and the waitress where locked in together and it was hot and they had to take off their clothes and fell into a passionate lesbian embrace... or was that bit in my head? No, wait, yes, that was a genuine scene. Phew. Nearly revealed my perverted fantasies to the world there!" – Amelia Lopside (2010)

"I’m sorry to say but I’m sick and tired of this version of Doctor Who after three episodes. If I didn’t fancy the pants off Sheridan Smith I doubt I’d be getting ANY enjoyment out of these plays! I CAN’T SURVIVE ON THIS DRIVEL! I WANT THE WATER-FIGHTS OF MARS!!!"
– DtennantSqueer90 on Gallifrey Base (2009)

"Not a patch on BBV’s Robin Hood Versus The Krynoid!"
– Ewen Campion-Clarke (2008)

"Oooh, whoopee-do. Some poor sucker gets merged with a returning monster! Wow, I haven’t seen THAT since the last story with the Cybermen. Or the Dustbins. Or the Afronauts. Or the Protons of all things... yes, you’re a poor innocent soul horribly mutilated! GET OVER IT ALREADY!" – Ian Sensitive (2009)

"I’ve seen up to one and half stories of this season and NOTHING has stood out! Oh, there were occasional glimpses of something, like a flash of breast flesh through a lace bra, but no complete whole that stands up to inspection! Paul McGann is bored shitless and lacks conviction in these bland, wallpaper efforts of one-listen wonders with no original ideas, constant returning monsters that totally fail to engage interest or concern! YOU ALL PLAIN SUCK!"
– Mad Larry the Pirate King (2009)

"I am totally disappointed with Neil’s special Doctor Who stories! Can he get his elfin brain together and answer me this: What’s with the fucking sixties? This is 2009, right? I hear about John Peel or any other geriatric I’m going to spew all over the iPod I listened to this crap on! What kind of shit IS this love, peace and understanding? D’you really think anyone today has time for that kind of nostalgia trip? I’m going shove this CD down the microwave!" - Nigel Planer (2009)


Psychotic Nostalgia -
"This story was... very ordinary."


Paul McGann Speaks!
"I like these dark, nihilistic fables of terror that play on our primal phobias and deepest desires and how they relate to human responses of the audience. These are still and will always remain the best themes for our never-ending stories, especially when we’re ripping of Nigel Kneale. It’s just a personal, almost infantile preference I tend to have. It’s all good. I prefer Moffat’s stories to RTD’s as well."


Sheridan Smith Speaks!
"This one was great fun, with Lucie trying to take over an eco-cult – really ironic as she would make most of the villains in Captain Planet look like Bono in comparison. There’s a real darkness in this, it’s really freaky and disturbing – but I’m pretty sure that’s because those bits were totally stolen from Quatermass. Not daft, me."


Neil Pye Speaks!
"If you want honesty, well get this, you freaks and Eton headcases – I used to pretend I was Meatloaf to try and get into parties, I once pretended to hallucinate after half a glass of advocaat and I once wanked into my grandfather’s Wellington boots and he never even noticed! People think I’m conservative, but I still think that Doctor Who is bourgeois, ever since that creepy old William Hartnell guy was trying to cop off with cavemen, right, when I was, like, 9 years old. That really brought me down, man, and it’s just typical it’s been made for 40 years since. That’s a big hassle for the cerebellum, you know. I bet no one even listens to this. It might as well be a Leonard Cohen album cover version by KD Lang."


Eddie Hitler Speaks!
"You want hard-hitting, gritty serious science fiction? Fine. But why the hell should we come up with something original when all you fan bastards want is it to be 1975 all over again? But when you actually get that, all you do is complain! DOES NOTHING PLEASE YOU?! No? GOOD!"


Trivia -
This story is amazingly popular due to its pro-carnivore anti-vegetarianism content: "Like Dr Who said, them plants is dangerous!" announced Carlton Bunch on the eatthembeforetheyeatus.com website.


Rumors & Facts -

Ah, the Krynoid! A, mute faceless monster that grows more and more menacing as we come to know more of its chilling nature! To see a sentient plant twisting and writhing like vines in the wind, sounding like dry leaves rustling in high tree branches as it consumes and engulfs hapless red shirts with no subtext or agenda whatsoever... When the Krynoids are around, there's no time for moralizing, no time to try and reason with this unreasonable, incorruptible alien menace!

Who hasn't walked past a waste ground and has been unnerved by the quickness it has been colonised by weeds? But who has felt that and been moronic enough to go, "Hey, that’d really work on audio where you can’t SEE the writhing vegetation and need all your cast to DESCRIBE it! In DETAIL!"?

Well, one man did... a stupid hippie by the name of Neil Weedon Watkins-Pye, a fictional character from The Young Ones made manifest by a second-hand quantum probability generator. After two years of squatting in the Big Finish Moat studios, Executive Producer Eddie Elizabeth Hitler (himself another comedy icon rendered flesh) decided it was time for the long-haired moaner to do more to justify his existence beyond making really shitty tea from the leaves vacuumed out of the carpet.

Neil Pye would write the second story of Hitler’s third season as producer! Of course, originally that story would have been "Return of the Red-Shift Quantum Space Monkeys!" by Alan Barnes in a pathetic attempt to turn one of his Eighth Doctor and Destrii comic strips from DWM into an audio drama. This idea was abandoned and replaced with Neil Pye’s entry, which was originally going to be two stories later. Boring, I know, but it’s absolutely true!!

Pye’s idea was for the Doctor and Lucie to finally reveal the shocking truth about the secret life of rubber plants. Pye passionately believed that plants were more intelligent than aggressive, macho, water-sport-obsessed dolphins and noted that "some tests" by "some scientists in California" proved this without a shadow of a doubt.

The actual narrative would be supplied by Pye’s rubber plant, Wayne. The autobiographical story would feature the Doctor and Lucie following Wayne as he set off on a trip to Mexico to score some peyote, hitchhiking with a pacifist Viking called Marty in a flying dragonship to get there. Scoring some drugs from a Mexican crocodile in a sombrero, the hallucinating Wayne, Doctor and Lucie tell Marty to fuck off and take them home. There they meet Stash, a friendly marijuana plant who is holding a party of drug-taking anachy in the toilet.

Suddenly, the paranoid Wayne and Stash suddenly think that the Doctor and Lucie are "pigs" and flee down the toilet. There they meet a friendly turd called Ploppy Man who they sail to Amsterdam and set up a porn-film racket, exploiting pirate videos to become rich and famous. After six years, Wayne decides to get out of this decadence and "wanders off to find his roots" by going ethnic.

Alas, Wayne soon abandoned the project altogether due to creative differences with Pye – specifically that not only had the stupid hippie deprived him of bio-strath for two months, he also used two of Wayne’s leaves as a makeshift joint out of sheer desperation. Pye would have to write the damn thing all by himself.

Inspired by the fact the previous season had got away with taking the piss out of Top Gear for two episodes, Pye decided to do the same to Heston Blumenthal – a vegetarian chef who runs a restaurant called The Fat Duck & The Chubby Carrot, with spicy pizzas that the Doctor would help distribute at the Chelsea Flower Show and mellow out the panel of Gardening Question Time. And everyone would really chill out and lead a pastoral existence where there are no monsters or weird alien death fleets.

It quickly became clear however that Pye’s idea was shit. Worse, Pye wasn’t actually interested in wasting his genius in the rationalistic straightjacket of the conventional linear time-space continuum. In other words, he was totally bored writing for Doctor Who and would rip off the first DVD he found, which just so happened to be The Seeds of Bloom – which, to be honest, could only be an improvement.

Pye defended this on the grounds that the Doctor should be into checking out his past lives like a psychic swimmer and have a sequel to a Tom Baker story. Hitler replied that this was, in fact, the twelfth such 1976-rip-off since Paul McGann took on the role in 1996, and promptly made Pye eat the furniture he was sitting on. Pye nevertheless maintained his desire to write about the Triffid-like Krynoids in a tale he could only dub "Vegetables Have Right Too!"

Pye ultimately combined both the plagiarism of The Seeds of Bloom with his original idea, Blooming Horrible, mainly because he couldn’t get it together to print out the entirety of a script and used some already existing pages to pad it out. It transpired that even THIS was not enough for more than twenty minutes so Pye used his Mystical Third Eye... to watch another DVD to rip off... which happened to be the Complete Second Series of Hazell.

Although he’d hate to come across as a total breadhead, Pye insisted on starring in the story, directing it, scoring the music, designing the CD cover and carrying out interviews with cast and crew in his "Elfin Digger" personae. This was so he was absolutely guaranteed to get MORE money than anyone else in the production. Although this megalomania was tolerated out of nostalgia for the good old days of Nicholas Briggs, Hitler took offense. Quite a lot.

Pye took this quite well, as the strange things done to him left him in the position to get high off his own farts (or the flatulantra position, as he called it). Hitler retaliated by flushing Pye’s head down the lavatory, forcing toilet paper up Pye’s anus, making Pye eat his own hair and then running him over by a number 78 bus.

Nevertheless, Pye was confident enough to pitch more stories to Hitler – including yet another version of his sitcom Ooh My Back! (renamed Game For A Totally Aggressive Meat-Eating Sneer for the Charley’s Odyssey range), Neil’s Official Good Hippy Guide 1984 (a new series of Dustbin Umpire), The Totally Self-Sufficient Whole Earth Acoustic Holistic Alternative World Catalogue (a Benny Summerfield story), All You Need Is Lentils (a Companion Chronicle with Adric), The Duvet Snatchers (which was supposed to be sent to Steve Moffat for the Eleventh Doctor and Amy but ended up being used as a paper plane instead) and The Young Ones Are Nothing Without Neil (for Touchwood).

Around the time Pye was attempting to sue the BBC that he, in fact, was actually the person who had come up with every single character in The Sarah-Jane Misadventures, he suffered a soul-shattering identity crisis. Was it Neil Pye who really invented the character of Sarah Jane Smith in 1974, or was it some other Neil who had taken over his body?

Pye was heard to shout "Of course it was you, you jerk! Shit who said that? oh no, this is getting freaky now! I think writing Doctor Who is really bad karma!" before he superglued his own toenail clippings to the roof of his mouth, announced he was a "Two-Faced Cosmic Wanker", ran off to Glastonbury. He was last seen lying in a patch of mushrooms before he slipped out of reality altogether.

And about time, too.

Meanwhile, no one gave a damn, even though Neil’s Heavy Concept Album was doing great on iTunes. They were far more interested in the next story for the Eighth Doctor – The Breasts of Orlock, which would reveal a new side to one his travelling companions... the one that wasn’t Smelly Ed, probably.

What left is there to say but quote Neil’s dying soliloquy -


Hurdy gurdy mushroom men
Mutate and transform and then
Everybody wants to kill me
Even that frozen screcrow in the sea
Lucie Miller with her golden hair
Shouts at me whenever I am there
And then I look and see I’m not
It makes me wonder quite a lot
If only all the Krynoids would go away
Please don’t hassle me today
Stop hassling me! Seriously!
I promise if you leave alone
I will stop getting stoned
I once sang a number one hit
But now my life has turned to shit!