Dark Season

Did You Know?

• Kate Winslet's first major professional acting role was as Reet in this serial.
• Davies wrote a novelisation of Dark Season for BBC Books, released at the same time as the TV broadcast.

Background

Russell T Davies was a BBC staff producer in the children's department at BBC Manchester, working on the summertime activity show Why Don't You?. He wrote an on-spec script for the first episode of Dark Season, originally titled The Adventuresome Three, and sent it via internal mail to the Head of Children's Programmes, Anna Home. Impressed, Home asked for a second episode. When Tony Robinson took a break from producing Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, a slot opened in the Children's BBC schedules for late 1991, and Home used Dark Season to fill it, commissioning Davies to write the remaining episodes.

Filming took place in Mytchett, Surrey; Farnborough, Hampshire (Woburn Avenue); and the long-closed Robert Haining Secondary School, in summer 1991. Studio scenes were shot at BBC's Ealing Studios. Transmitted on Thursdays at 4.35 pm from 14 November to 19 December 1991, each episode was repeated the following Sunday morning. Viewing figures varied from 3.6 to 4.2 million per episode.

Davies wrote a novelisation for BBC Books, released concurrently with the serial and advertised after each episode. He later wrote a second children's science-fiction serial, Century Falls, in 1993, before moving to adult television drama. Dark Season was reshown on BBC One in 1994 and repeated on the CBBC Channel in 2002, cropped to 14:9 widescreen with loss of top and bottom sections. It was released on DVD by 2|entertain Ltd on 24 July 2006 with a PG rating.

Cast and crew

The director was Colin Cant, known for producing Grange Hill throughout the 1980s and directing Moondial (1988). The three leads were 19-year-old Victoria Lambert as the 13-year-old Marcie, Ben Chandler as Tom, and Kate Winslet as Reet. Supporting roles included Brigit Forsyth as Miss Maitland and Jacqueline Pearce as Miss Pendragon. Pearce was known for playing Servalan in Blake's 7 and had worked with Cant on Moondial. Davies noted in an interview with SFX magazine that Pearce was delighted her character was supposed to be a lesbian but refused to dye her hair, hence the turban.

Reception

The show received increased critical attention after its DVD release and Davies' announcement of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Television Heaven called it 'by turns amusing, aware, suspenseful, exciting and imaginative' and 'an almost criminally overlooked example of children's genre television of the highest quality'. Gareth Roberts, head writer of series 1 of The Sarah Jane Adventures, said Dark Season 'was exactly what I wanted to do at the time—write a cracking kids' sci-fi show.' DVD Times called it 'an enjoyable story' but criticised the split of the plot into two halves as 'clumsy' and noted a 'tendency towards handwaving and gobbledygook to resolve the plot(s).'

Commonality with Doctor Who

Dark Season contains similarities to Doctor Who, which Davies revived in 2005. Marcie occupies a narrative space similar to the Doctor, with Reet and Thomas as companions, though Davies has denied this was intentional. He claimed the only direct reference to classic Doctor Who is a scene where Reet uses a yo-yo to test gravity. Elements from Dark Season have appeared in later Doctor Who fiction.

Davies mentioned Marcie in his 1996 Doctor Who – The New Adventures novel Damaged Goods. In the 2005 episode 'The End of the World', Rose Tyler is trapped behind a door that refuses to open, as Reet was in Episode Six; both characters respond with 'Where am I gonna go, Ipswich?'. The setting of Dark Season was compared to the 2006 episode 'School Reunion', and Davies requested that episode be relocated from an army base to a school. The 2008 Christmas special 'The Next Doctor' recycles elements of the Behemoth in the CyberKing, with both stories featuring lead female villains tricked into enthronement and entrapment inside a monster of their own making.