Saturday 22 November 1980

State of Decay

The East Wing of the Hydrax

The Colour of Monsters, Episode 4
Sunday 14 December 2025

This week, on a planet where evil carnivorous overlords oppress and prey on a helpless populace, we decide to watch and discuss State of Decay.

Notes and links

As we said last week, Horror of Fang Rock was a hurried replacement for a Terrance Dicks script called The Vampire Mutation, after the Head of Serials Graeme McDonald asked them not to proceed with the script because of a high-profile BBC telemovie called Count Dracula (1977), which was to screen later that year. Doctor Who researcher Paul Scoones has the full story…

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in 1985. Particularly emphasised in the book is the fact that Offred is forbidden to read, and is left alone for hours in her room with nothing to do. This is an echo of the South’s anti-literacy laws, which were used to suppress the education of enslaved people, or black people more generally, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Marxism, mystification is the process by which the ruling class attempts to obscure the true nature of their power and control over society. And so Aukon, Camilla and Zargo invent the Wasting to position themselves as the people’s saviours rather than their oppressors.

Inevitably, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) comes up again as a possible source of inspiration for this story. We talked about it last week as well.

And then, as so often in the 1970s, Doctor Who takes its inspiration from the Hammer Horror films of the 50s, 60s and 70s — particularly the nine Dracula films, the first of which, Dracula (1958), starred Christopher Lee as Dracula and our very own Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. In 1972, a very young Lalla Ward appeared in a Hammer Horror film, Vampire Circus, which also starred Adrienne Corri, who played Mena in The Leisure Hive.

Hammer House of Horror (1980) was a short-lived anthology television series created by Hammer Film Productions. Its final episode, The Mark of Satan, aired on ITV on 6 December 1980, the same night as Part 3 of State of Decay. Emrys James, who is Aukon in this story, appeared in both.

Lalla Ward and Emrys James both appeared in the BBC’s production of Hamlet (1980), part of its full set of Shakespeare plays broadcast between 1978 and 1985. Ward played Ophelia, while James played the Player King. (Hamlet was our very own Derek Jacobi, his mother was Doctor Who’s own mother Claire Bloom, and his murderous stepfather Claudius was played by Patrick Stewart.)

Nathan alludes to the Flight Through Entirety episode on The Hand of Fear, whose title encapsulates the typical Hinchcliffe-Era Doctor Who monster: Episode 45: Not Sufficiently Executed Enough.

William Lindsay, who plays Zargo here, also appears in the Blake’s 7 Series D classic Animals, where he plays the Captain, a young Federation officer who joins Servalan in the moderately expensive hotel room bar that she drives around the galaxy during that final season.

By 1981, Terrance was script editing BBC Classic Serials, miniseries adaptations of classic novels, including The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982, starring Tom Baker and Caroline John) and The Invisible Man (1984, inevitably featuring Michael Sheard). By 1985, he was producing them. His career is described in detail in Toby Hadoke’s obituary of Terrance, published in The Guardian in September 2019.

Flight Through Entirety discussed State of Decay in Episode 71: Why is E-Space Green?, released on Sunday 24 April 2016.

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And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

We’ve just released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched the Star Trek: Voyager episode Memorial. Keep an eye out for our next episode — our Christmas special, where we’ll be discussing William Shatner’s towering directorial début, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.