The Death of Art (TV Story)

***The Death of Art*** was the first serial of Season 32 of *Doctor Who*. It was written by Simon Bucher-Jones, directed by Michael Samuels, and starred Richard Griffiths as the Eighth Doctor, Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield and Robert Llewellyn as Norman Manning.

## Synopsis

1880's France: the corrupt world of the Third Republic. A clandestine brotherhood is engaged in a desperate internal power struggle; a race of beings seeks to free itself from perpetual oppression; and a rip in time threatens an entire city. The future of Europe is at stake, in a war fought with minds and bodies altered to the limits of human evolution.

Norman finds himself working undercover with a suspicious French gendarme; Bernice follows a psychic artist whose talents are attracting the attention of mysterious forces; and the Doctor befriends a shape-shifting member of a terrifying family. And, at the heart of it all, a dark and disturbing injustice is being perpetrated. Only an end to the secret war, and the salvation of an entire race, can prevent Paris from being utterly destroyed.

## Cast

* The Doctor - Richard Griffiths
* Bernice - Lisa Bowerman
* Norman - Robert Llewellyn
* David Clayton - Philip Rosch
* Tomas - Donald Douglas
* Montague - Nicholas Farrell
* Clarissa Montfalcon - Petra Markham
* Dominic Montfalcon - Richard Hope
* Emil Montfalcon - Reece Shearsmith
* August Mirakle - George Asprey
* Anton Jarre - Arthur Bostrom
* Claudette - Olivia Williams
* Jean Veber - Danny Webb
* Alfred Dreyfus - Tony Scannell
* Duquesne - Richard Thorp
* Hubert - Andy Nyman
* Jean Mayeur - Hugh Fraser
* Balmarian - Jason Salkey
* Kasper - Jonathan Kydd
* Pierre Duval - David Hargreaves
* Voice of Truthseeker - Tony Robinson

### Devices

* The ormolu clock is still within the TARDIS.

### The Doctor

* The Doctor was once invited to the Rani's 94th birthday party.

### People

* Georges-Eugene Haussmann became Prefect of Paris in the 1850s.
* Bernice Summerfield recalls guarding the fake mystic Rhan-Te-Goth in the 30th century during her three-month stint on fraudster watch assigned by her trainer Konstantine.

### Species

* The Time Lords' lives are linear, just in more dimensions.

### Sports

* Benny practices archery.
* Norman doesn't know a lot about cricket.

### Theories and concepts

* The Sensory Limitation Effect is a barrier of scale where events take place over timescales too vast to be meaningful.

## Notes

* This story is based on the historical events of the Dreyfus Affair.
* The story makes references to the disappearance of the author of *The Dynamics of an Asteroid* - i.e. Professor James Moriarty, last seen falling off a cliff in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story *The Final Problem*.
* Anton Jarre recalls meeting a Belgian police sergeant who is clearly intended to be a young Hercule Poirot, the detective created by Agatha Christie.
* The story makes reference to the events of *The Murders in the Rue Morgue* by Edgar Allan Poe.

## Home Video & DVD Releases

### VHS

* This story was released on VHS in 1999.

### DVD

* This story along with the other stories in Season 32 were released as *Doctor Who: The Complete Thirty-Second Season* in 2008.

### Blu-ray

* This story along with the other stories in Season 32 were upscaled in 1080i50 high definition and were released as *Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 32* in the UK.