THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS
Harrison Chase
Reviews

Scarier than an Eight-Foot High Carnivorous Plant by Stephen Maslin 26/7/15

There was a time, hard to believe it now, when Doctor Who was generally a subject of ridicule. Some of it, let's be fair, was well merited. A lot of it was not. For example, in one of the many retrospective documentaries that the BBC used to trot out from time to time as a grudging apology for not making Season 27, there was one rather lame assertion that many of Doctor Who's villains were rather over the top. (Golly! Really? Who knew?)

"Forethought and initiative, Mister Dunbar. Two excellent attributes."
The implication was that some actors took things too far and hammed it up. A clip of, say, Michael Spice in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, or of Graham Crowden in Horns of the Nimon (in fact, of anyone in Horns of the Nimon) and I wouldn't have batted an eyelid. Guilty as charged, m'lud. Yet the clip they used to illustrate their supposed truism was of Tony Beckley as Harrison Chase. That, I felt, was unfair. For Harrison Chase is as perfectly judged a villain as Doctor Who has ever had.
"I understand policemen are few and far between in the Antarctic."
Take one or two of his lines from The Seeds of Doom out of context and you might - might - just stumble across something that seems a bit OTT. Yet even then one could point out that television programmes, when functioning as a means of entertainment or distraction, tend to conform to (and create) certain conventions, including greater and lesser degrees of 'realism', depending on what's on screen. Besides, it was the 1970s: not even real life was true to life in the 1970s.
"I could play all day in my green cathedral."
Even then, you would still be missing what those of us who have seen the whole glorious six part adventure have not (for they that know only 'Timon of Athens' do not know all of Shakespeare). Long before Chase's demise in his own shredder, Messrs Beckley and Banks Stewart (along with director Douglas Camfield) have built up a completely rounded character, not one word or gesture of which is out of place: a precisely delineated style and manner. The effeteness, the gloves, the obsession, the almost permanent disdain. . .
"What do you for an encore, Doctor?"
For all his camp demeanor, Harrison Chase is, need one point out, ruthless, driven, witty, fastidious, supremely self-assured and rather charming (and surrounded by idiots). So much the better that he is not painted green, with a latex skull-cap and false eyebrows and goes by the name of Yorbo, or we would be denied a villain to whom we could fully respond. (See also the relative effectiveness of Tobias Vaughn compared with that of Mavic Chen.)
"Scorby! Get Dunbar!"
People who criticize larger-than-life portrayals in Doctor Who, past and present, are perfectly entitled to do so and are quite often spot on. Yet in this case this is ultimately beside the point. Hollywood action pictures are stuffed to the gills with action heroes full of an immediate and tedious machismo but with almost nothing else to define them. (They thump people without, as it were, leaving any lasting impression.) How much more satisfying to have a character slowly built up in front of our eyes, layer by layer.
"I don't care who it's killed. People are replaceable."
Harrison Chase's vocal delivery, his mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, and his intentions all fit together into one coherent whole and Tony Beckley does a superb job in making the character come to life, making almost every line so deliciously quotable. Without him, The Seeds of Doom would not be the classic it undoubtedly is.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Perhaps you thought that the real 'enemy' of The Seeds of Doom was the Krynoid. It is a threat certainly - the threat - but there's a sense of it simply following its instincts to survive. (This is what makes it being able to talk at one stage rather jarring. Other than the polystyrene snow and the Doctor twisting Scorby's head off, it is the only flaw one can find in this glorious story.) Harrison Chase is far more villainous because of the lengths to which he is prepared to go against creatures of his own species. When Keeler describes wanting to see what happens when the Krynoid touches human flesh as "inhuman", Chase's only response is that he doesn't care. Scary indeed.