Gallifrey Series IV
I come to Big Finish’s new Gallifrey series from a slightly different angle from most of its listeners. I listened to the first three series several years ago, and was unimpressed – I remember the first series as being moderately entertaining fluff, while the second and third series got so far up their own arsehole they actually succeeded at navel-gazing from the inside, (This may be an unfair judgement. I remember them as being the very definition of fanwank, but it may well be that the attempt to do a fifteen-part epic story was just too ambitious for my own attention span).
But series three of Gallifrey had ended on a cliffhanger – the start of The Time War, with ‘some metal gentlemen’ having infected all of Gallifrey with a virus. And if there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s the Time War. Especially since reading Richard & Alex’s wonderful Fractal History Of The Time War, I’ve been treating the Time War in my head like a gigantic multidimensional puzzle.
The interesting thing about the Time War is that the further one gets from ‘canon’, the more interesting the stories become. The Faction Paradox books are among the best books I’ve ever read, as is Dead Romance (which is slightly more ‘canon’ than the books). The Faction Paradox audios (with officially licensed Doctor Who baddies) and the Eighth Doctor books are good – sometimes very good – but rarely great. And the actual 2005-2009 TV series that established a version of the war as ‘canon’ is, to my mind, pretty much uniformly awful. The Time War/The War/The War In Heaven is as much as anything a war between alternative versions of history, and a history written by the winners and imposed from above is usually far less interesting than the multiple perspectives of the oppressed – would you rather read Homage To Catalonia or a piece of Falangist propaganda?
That’s not to compare Russel Davies to Generalissimo Franco – though I can imagine certain of the more rabid message board denizens emulating the example of the Tilbury dockers – Davies has actually been remarkably good on the issue of ‘canon’, loudly and publicly refusing to use his position of authority (in the minds of the kind of fans who like authorities) to adjudicate on what does and doesn’t ‘count’. For all the faults I find with him, Davies’ view is an inclusive one.
Rather, it’s to argue that those who are looking for certainty and ‘canon’ are limiting themselves unnecessarily (an argument I have made before, of course, in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!). The Daleks as one possible Enemy in the Time War is a decent, though rather obvious, seed for other stories. The Daleks as *the* Enemy, on the other hand, closes off the other possibilities (an incursion of Time Lords from another ‘bottle universe’, the Time Lords themselves in the future/past, a new idea that radically disrupts ossified ways of thinking, the writers of the books themselves, a non-existent threat created purely to give the illusion of conflict, humanity, the vampires/Mal’akh wanting their universe back, the new TV series itself… ).
It might be fun, in fact, to do a few posts here looking at different options as to who or what The Enemy is. I particularly like the war between the Time Lords and The Enemy as the war between the ‘classic’ (small-c conservative, big-L Liberal) and Welsh (New Labour – modern, glossy, “we can brook no criticism, because however bad it is, it’s better than the horrible wilderness years we had before, do you want Thatcher back/the show off the air again?”) series…
But anyway, if we pop out of this digression from a digression from a digression, the Gallifrey audios – like the Big Finish audios generally – are in an odd place when it comes to ‘canon’ for those who care about such things. They’re officially licensed, but have to be approved by the makers of the current show. But at the same time, they can’t make reference to anything in that show. So even though Gary Russell, who is in charge of the Gallifrey series, is also a script editor on the Welsh series, and he has clearly stated (including on the special features for these stories) that he intends the War that happened off-stage between series three and four to be the Time War featured in the TV show, this can’t be stated directly in the stories themselves. This leads to an interesting kind of forced ambiguity being imposed *against* authorial intent.
And whether intentionally or not, this has produced a story where the in-universe and out-of-universe epistemic statuses are mirrored. We have a multiple-universe story (always a very good thing), but one where all the alternate universes travelled to are just that – alternate universes. They exist not as the parallel worlds in, say, Lance Parkin’s Faction Paradox novel Warlords Of Utopia, do – as worlds whose divergences produce results both good (in Parkin’s case, a peace that has lasted millennia, and a flowering of culture and technology) and bad (dictatorship, paedophilia as social norm, slavery). Rather, they exist as wrong turns that could have been taken, lessons that this (or in this case, the main Doctor Who universe) is the best of all possible worlds, with each of these universes being defined as wrong, inferior timelines, and each one diverging in precisely one way, which leads to disaster.
So along with the ‘real’ Romana, Leela and K9, plus the characters Narvin and Braxiatel from earlier stories, we get alternative versions of Romana (both her first and second regenerations), Leela (an articulate, educated fascist torturer, whose distinctly different tones show once and for all that Leela’s rather stilted way of talking is a deliberate acting decision by Louise Jameson, rather than a poor performance), two Sixth Doctors, and more, all in some ways ‘worse’ than the ones we know.
(Sadly there is no alternate K9. John Leeson was the star of the earlier Gallifrey series, with his bitching between the two K9s. Here, there is only one, and he doesn’t get to shine the same way except during his brief promotion to Castellan).
Of the four stories here – which can only be bought as a bundle, though for a very reasonable £30 (£35 if you want the CDs rather than just downloads), by far the best is CD3 – Gallifrey: Annihilation. Oddly, given that Russell was a co-writer, and he’s known for being more obsessed with continuity and fan-wank than most, there are no alternative Doctors or Romanas or whoever (though Lord Prydon *may* be intended to be an alternate Master, given that he’s played by Geoffrey Beevers), and surprisingly/thankfully Katy Manning isn’t playing Jo Grant or Iris Wildthyme, but a female Borussa.
For those of us who like playing games with that sort of thing, in fact, this story could fit quite neatly in with Faction Paradox, as it’s set on a Gallifrey where Rassilon was turned into a vampire by the Great Vampire, and there’s a civil war between the Vampire Gallifreyans and the ‘True Lords’, who never developed time travel but *could* regenerate. This could easily be the timeline from which the Faction’s masks come, and it will be in my ‘personal canon’ from now on. (Also in my ‘personal canon’, these are four of the Nine Homeworlds. No-one said the Nine Homeworlds had to be in *this* timeline – or if they did I don’t remember, which is the same thing).
It’s quite a nice piece of space-opera-Gothic, Beevers makes an appropriately sepulchral vampire, and it’s an entertaining way to spend an hour, though hardly ground-breaking stuff.
The worst, unfortunately, is Justin Richards’ Gallifrey: Disassembled. I say unfortunately, partly because this has the best performances of the bunch (from Louise Jameson as two Leelas, and a great turn by Colin Baker as Lord Burner), and the first half-hour or so is genuinely good, but it soon degenerates into a load of nonsense, with illogical, made-up-on-the-fly rules about what does and doesn’t count as a paradox, hints at Braxiatel being the Doctor’s brother, explanations as to why the Doctor originally left Gallifrey…
When I say that the big turning point in this universe is that Zagreus took the place of The Other in its history, I think that will tell everyone all they need to know (if you don’t know what those words mean, be thankful…)
The other two stories, Gallifrey: Reborn and Gallifrey: Forever, bookend the series quite nicely, providing us with, respectively, the set-up for this four-story series, and a new status quo at the end with Romana and Leela trapped on a Gallifrey which hadn’t yet invented time travel but where Romana’s now president.
Overall, quality-wise this sits somewhere in the middle of Big Finish’s range. Nowhere near a genuine masterpiece like Peri And The Piscon Paradox or some of their other recent triumphs, this still feels like it was created because of someone’s desire to tell the story, and so it’s still above some of the landfill “let’s have the Doctor team up with two companions from different eras, and have them fight the Celestial Toymaker, who’s teamed up with the Zarbi” stuff they do when inspiration fails completely.
You already know if this is the kind of thing you like or not (in fact you probably either ordered it in advance or are never going to hear it), but for the kind of thing it is, it’s well done. And thankfully, either through diktat from above or through taste on the part of Gary Russell, it leaves as many questions about the Time War unanswered at the end as at the beginning.
Big Finish: Peri And The Piscon Paradox
Big Finish’s output has been very, very variable recently. In the last couple of years, since they started doing ‘trilogies’ rather than stand-alone stories, they’ve become increasingly likely to do complicated continuity-twisting stories – the Sixth Doctor travelling with the Second Doctor’s companion, the Sixth Doctor travelling with the *Eighth* Doctor’s companion, three Celestial Toymaker stories in a year… this month’s story involves the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn teaming up with DI Menzies (a character from the Sixth Doctor’s future who has to pretend she doesn’t know him) against Thomas Brewster (a character from a Fifth Doctor trilogy from a couple of years ago).
But then you get stuff like A Death In The Family, the recent story by Steven Hall (the writer of The Raw Shark Texts), which manages to play with continuity lightly and tell a story about the nature of reality, the nature of fiction, the power of words, and the sacrifices people will make for each other. The gimmick – the Seventh Doctor and Evelyn – and the continuity references (it ties up threads from at least eight different stories going back nearly a decade) don’t matter. A Death In The Family is as good as anything Big Finish have done in the last five years, and was far and away the best thing they put out last year.
It’s only the 23rd of January, but I already know what the best thing they’ll put out this year is.
Peri and the Piscon Paradox is part of the Companion Chronicles range – a range of stories closer to audiobooks than the full-cast dramas Big Finish usually do, where an actor playing one of the Doctor’s companions tells a story over the course of a single CD, with one other actor usually taking part to play a character they’re narrating to or something.
This one, by Nev Fountain, is a little different in that it’s two CDs long, and the second actor is actually Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor. It’s also the single best multi-Doctor story ever. This post, like all my reviews, may contain spoilers from here on in, but be assured I’m not actually spoiling anything.
The first disc tells a story of Peri and the Fifth Doctor fighting a fish-monster-thing in LA in 2009, with the assistance of Peri’s ‘forty-several’ year old self, an agent for a secret government agency who Peri quickly grows to despise. It ends with Peri vowing never to become like her older self.
The second disc tells the story of Doctor Perpugilliam Brown, presenter of a ‘celebrity relationship counselling’ TV show, and how she gets dragged into a complicated plot by a man claiming to be someone she once met in Lanzarotte, more than twenty years ago, even though he looks nothing like him, and how that plot involves tricking a past self she can’t remember.
Those who remember Nev Fountain’s earlier Big Finish work, especially The Kingmaker, will recognise a number of his regular motifs as the story goes on. Not only are there multiple Doctors interacting without being fully aware of each other’s actions, and time paradoxes, there are many, many jokes set up in the first half that only pay off in the second. The first three-quarters of this story, in fact, is pretty much laugh-out-loud funny throughout. I know it’s hard to believe, given that Fountain also wrote for Dead Ringers, but it is a good piece of comedy.
And Nicola Bryant is excellent. Despite the fact that she’s hampered by having to do the accent and characterisation she lumbered herself with as a much younger actor, she manages to play the two Peris remarkably well, and it’s an astonishingly subtle, nuanced performance for someone who never really shone on the TV. Colin Baker is, of course, as excellent as ever, and is in it more than you might think.
But it’s only at the end, when the full story is revealed, that what Fountain is doing really falls into place and you realise just how good this actually is. In a couple of lines of dialogue, Fountain clears up a continuity problem that avid fans reading this have already spotted. At the same time, he also manages to make the story about things – about growing up, about betraying our youthful ideals, about our youthful ideals betraying us, and about how we harden with age and with compromise. It’s a very sad, very political story, in the end. He gives the story a bittersweet ending that fits in with my own preferred ‘all stories are true’ Doctor Who ‘canon’, and he manages to make the same scene seen from two different angles mean two totally different things. It turns what was already one of the best stories Big Finish have done in a long time into one of the best they’ve ever done.
A Death In The Family is better, but that requires you to have listened to more stories and to have an attachment to the characters. This is a wonderful comedy that suddenly punches you in the gut, and will do so no matter who you are.
All the praise that people have been giving Moffat’s A Christmas Carol should really be going to this story – it does the same things (and indeed some of the same things that this month’s main-range Big Finish story does) so much better that the TV story looks like a sad parody of this one. It’s a story that anyone at all could listen to and get a *lot* out of, and it’s something that could only have been done as Doctor Who. I’ve only listened to it once, but it may be in my all-time favourite Doctor Who stories. It’s certainly in my favourite Big Finishes (along with Davros, The Kingmaker, Jubilee, A Death In The Family, Doctor Who And The Pirates, The Holy Terror and Spare Parts) and is one I would urge anyone to listen to.
Even many Big Finish fans don’t buy the Companion Chronicles, because they’re seen as cheap filler things This one really, really isn’t. It’s as good as anything they’ve done. Buy it, if you like funny, intelligent, thought provoking science fiction, whether or not it’s labelled Doctor Who. It’s only a tenner as a download, and it’s worth every penny.
I do have one proviso though, that I feel obliged to mention even though it may be slightly more of a spoiler than the other things I’ve said
and that is that the ending may be triggering for those who have experienced spousal abuse. It’s dealt with sensitively, and in a way that’s necessary to the plot, but be aware that it’s there.
A Big Finish BBC Audiobook A Week – Hornets Nest: The Stuff Of Nightmares
This CD only came out today, so for once I’ll precede my review with a Spoiler Warning. I don’t actually have a *lot* to say about it, but it’s worthy of comment, so…
Have you been adequately warned?
Then I’ll begin…
Hornets Nest: The Stuff Of Nightmares, by Paul Magrs (who I’ll be talking about in a future hyperpost, incidentally), has been getting a lot of publicity, because it’s Tom Baker’s first ‘proper’ return to the role of The Doctor since he left in 1981 (he did a thing for the godawful charidee Dimensions In Time excrescence, and he reads some of the audiobooks of the Target novels and narrates some of the soundtrack CDs of lost stories, but it’s the first actual new story he’s done since Logopolis).
Rather surprisingly, he’s chosen to work with the BBC rather than with Big Finish, who up to now have produced every legitimate Doctor Who audio story since 1999. This caused a huge amount of worry among some people, until it was announced that Big Finish’s license had been renewed. Judging by this, they needn’t have worried – rather surprisingly, the BBC can’t compete with Big Finish when it comes to producing audio drama.
Partly, that’s because that’s not what they’re really trying to do here. The format isn’t like Big Finish’s regular range – an audio play with dialogue, sound effects and music. Rather it’s closer to their Companion Chronicles format – a narrator or narrators doing what amounts to reading a prose story, but with dialogue supplied by other actors, along with background effects.
This similarity is unfortunately exacerbated by the fact that this story has two narrators and a storyline about inanimate objects coming to life – just like The Mahogany Murders, a recent and rather better Companion Chronicle.
In fact, the story, while well-written (some great lines, like “I opened the badger’s brain, using very tiny brain scissors”, from the Doctor) , is surprisingly generic. In fact, it ‘reads’ like a Pertwee (or first-Baker-series) story – the plot (a factory owner, originally motivated by environmental concern, is brainwashed by evil insects and used by them to turn stuffed animals into drones controlled by the insects, which then kill prominent political figures) sounds like someone’s half-remembered the plots to The Green Death and Spearhead From Space and turned them into one story. It’s Generic Pertwee Plot #12, and feels like something Bob Holmes (and Holmes is definitely the influence here, with the mind-control and inanimate objects coming to life, but it’s the comparatively restrained Holmes of the Pertwee years rather than the Gonzo Gothic of the Baker era) tossed off in five minutes as a gap-filler.
It also doesn’t play to Baker’s strengths – Baker does a great job here in the bits where he’s narrating (the narration switches between Baker and 70s companion Mike Yates, played by Richard Franklin, another link back to the Pertwee years), but he’s always been at his best when interacting with others – the contrast between his Doctor’s eccentricity and the normal characters around him always being a big part of his appeal. By having so much of the story told as infodump, that appeal is largely lost – there is very little actual dialogue in this (and for the first long chunk of the story it seems horribly like the Doctor will be confined to the odd line here or there, before he takes over the narration).
For an audience coming to this from the other BBC audiobooks – straight readings of novelisations of TV shows – this will be a pleasant change, but compared to Big Finish’s productions it seems slightly underwhelming – it’s just not using the medium well enough.
That said, I will still be buying the rest of the series – it’s definitely entertaining, and while the story is not up to the standard of Big Finish’s best, it’s definitely not *bad* either – it’s a pleasant, diverting hour-and-ten-minutes of entertainment, with Tom Baker getting to do his thing again. It’s firmly aimed at a casual nostalgia market, rather than being aimed at either hardcore fans or people who are interested in innovative drama, but that’s not a bad thing. On its own terms it’s enjoyable enough, but I hope if Baker does any more, that he will turn to Big Finish…
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ – Doctor Who Unbound: Deadline (hyperpost 1)
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
Doctor Who Unbound: Deadline
THIS IS AN IMAGINARY STORY (WHICH MAY NEVER HAPPEN, BUT THEN AGAIN MAY) ABOUT A MAN WHO CAME FROM THE SKY IN A BIG BLUE BOX AND DID ONLY GOOD.IT TELLS OF HIS TWILIGHT, WHEN THE GREAT BATTLES WERE OVER AND THE GREAT MIRACLES LONG SINCE PERFORMED, OF HIS HIS ENEMIES CONSPIRED AGAINST HIM AND OF THAT FINAL WAR IN THE BLIND WASTES BENEATH THE MEDUSA CASCADE; OF THE WOMEN HE LOVED AND OF THE CHOICES HE MADE FOR THEM; OF HOW HE BROKE HIS MOST SACRED OATH, AND HOW FINALLY ALL THE THINGS HE HAD WERE TAKEN FROM HIM SAVE FOR ONE.
IN THE BIG CITY, PEOPLE STILL SOMETIMES GLANCE UP HOPEFULLY FROM THE SIDEWALKS, HEARING A DISTANT WHEEZING, GROANING SOUND.. BUT NO: IT’S ONLY A SAW, ONLY A MACHINE. THE DOCTOR DIED TEN YEARS AGO. THIS IS AN IMAGINARY STORY…
AREN’T THEY ALL?
I didn’t write that, it’s from here. I was actually googling to find the precise wording of the opening paragraph of Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow, so I could quote the first couple of sentences, but if you google “This is an imaginary story which may never happen” (without the quotes) that’s the first result involving the quote. One of those synchronicities…
There’s a long tradition in comics of ‘imaginary stories’, started by Superman editor Mort Weisinger in the 1960s (though someone will no doubt point me to an example from Pep Comics from 1939 or something), where stories that ‘didn’t really happen’ could happen – Superman could die, or marry Lois Lane, or split into red and blue versions of himself, or something else that could never happen in the ‘real’ comics, with no consequences – it was just an ‘imaginary story’, not a true story like all the other ones. This later became formalised in both the major comic companies as the series “What If?” in Marvel and “Elseworlds” in DC, where we could ask questions like “What would happen if Superman had landed in King Arthur’s time?”, “What would happen if Superman was adopted by Batman’s parents?” or “What would happen, right, if Batman had been a vampire? Wouldn’t that have been, like, just kickass?”
While these stories *could* have been an exciting and interesting thing to do – a way to tell stories about these well-known characters without having to dot the is and cross the ts and ensure they say nothing that contradicts anything in 70 years of already-mutually-contradictory stories, in fact they never were. In the DC Elseworlds stories, no matter what the premise, it almost always went the same way – everything would turn out exactly as it had ‘in continuity’, just with a different backdrop. Sir Kal would joust with the evil black knight Sir Luthor for the hand of Lady Lois, while his squire Jim Olsen looked on along with his aged mentor Sir Perry The White (I’ve not actually read the ‘what if Superman landed in Camelot?’ one, but I already know exactly how it would go). Meanwhile, in Marvel’s hands, the ‘What If…?’ question was always (for values of always that equal ‘quite often’) answered “the world would have ended”. What if Wolverine had had baked beans instead of tomatoes for his breakfast? – He would have broken wind and alerted the Skrulls to the X-Men’s presence and they’d have destroyed the world. What if Ben Grimm had bent over to tie his shoelaces? – A villain wouldn’t have tripped over them, and wouldn’t have been caught, and would have used his doomsday device…
In other words, what could be a way of freeing writers and artists from the creative straitjacket of continuity is instead turned into a way of reinforcing the primacy of ‘canon’. Things couldn’t be different, because no matter what change you make, no matter how major or minor, things still turn out exactly the same (DC) or the world would end (Marvel) so the only story that ‘matters’ is the mainline one. All is for the best in the best of all possible continuities. Hopelessly Panglossian indeed.
Big Finish also created their own range of ‘Imaginary Stories’ – the Doctor Who: Unbound range of audio stories – in the early 1990s, and for much the same reasons. Fans wanted to hear what it would be like if The Doctor was played by David Warner (the answer is exactly as you’d expect, which is a good thing), or “What if… the Doctor regenerated into a woman?!” or “What if the Valeyard had won?!!!!!”
These plays (which are all, incidentally, in the Big Finish For A Fiver promotion if you want to pick up some fun, cheap entertainment) were done at the time when BF were doing their best work, so they were pretty good, but that’s all they were – pretty good – with one exception, Rob Shearman’s Deadline, starring Sir Derek Jacobi (available here).
While the blurb for that story makes it seem like it’s an absolutely standard Doctor Who story, it’s anything but. In fact, it’s not a Doctor Who story at all, but a story *about* Doctor Who. Jacobi plays a retired writer, a once-prominent playwright who had descended to hack TV work (any resemblance of this character to prominent playwright turned Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman is, one hopes, purely coincidental given the life the character is living). Stuck in a nursing home, slowly losing his sanity, estranged from his family, he muses on where it all went wrong, deciding that the turning point probably came when a TV show for which he’d been commissioned to write, Doctor Who, was cancelled before it ever aired.
While there are many hilarious moments in the story , as one would expect from Shearman, “We have so much in common – we write, we have bladder control, and we’re lonely” being a prime line, the story is one of the darkest, most upsetting pieces of drama I’ve heard in a long time.
Every character is emotionally crippled and monstrous. Martin Bannister, the writer, destroyed three marriages in pursuit of writing which even when he was at his youthful best never had any humanity to it. Sydney, the journalist for the official Juliet Bravo Magazine (Juliet Bravo was a real British TV cop show from the early 80s, which had many of the same writers and directors as Doctor Who, especially from its third series when Robert Holmes’ protege/former Who and Blake’s Seven writer Chris Boucher was the script editor) is a parody of the sad anorak fan (one of the few missteps in the story – this character seems dislikeable because Shearman dislikes people like that, rather than through his own actions). Nurse Wright is a sad old spinster, desperate for a sexual relationship with her patient but turning violent when it looks like it might actually happen, and Martin’s son Philip has spent his entire life trying not to be anything like his father, but is exactly like him in the end, and so desperate to talk to him he fakes his own mother’s death just for an excuse to get back in touch.
Throughout this, we keep slipping into Martin’s fantasy world – the world of the Doctor, made up of Martin’s scripts for those first few episodes (all of which are *almost* exactly like the scripts for early or unmade Hartnell stories, but not quite as good), with Martin as the Doctor – where he can be a good person, and has a granddaughter whom he loves, and where he’s a hero and nothing ever goes wrong. Slowly his dreams start to leak into reality – that wardrobe seems bigger on the inside than on the outside, doesn’t it? And doesn’t that green stain look like alien footprints? – and he has to decide if, in fact, reality is all it’s cracked up to be – if it’s better to be the Doctor, or to be someone whose greatest achievement is that he wrote the fifteen least-popular episodes of Juliet Bravo.
Many of the themes in this story are very much of a part with Shearman’s earlier story The Holy Terror – the writer who harmed his son because of his obsession with his own work, and who retreats into a fantasy world, occurs in both, while the characters being haunted by ghosts of their past, and the thin borderline between reality and fiction, are recurring themes in all Shearman’s Doctor Who work.
Deadline is in an unfortunate position, in that Doctor Who fans are the only people who could really appreciate it, yet that conservative group are probably the least likely group to be able to understand what Shearman is doing. This is simultaneously a Radio 4 Play For Today about a dying writer’s relationship with his family and a genre ‘Elseworlds’ story. In fact, it’s an Elseworlds that manages to use this world as the world from which it departs, rather than the fictional universe it’s ostensibly connected to. Like those Elseworlds, it shows that if you change one thing – in this case, the broadcasting history of a forty-year-old children’s programme – almost nothing would have changed. But like the What If? stories, it shows that for at least one person, getting rid of Doctor Who would have been the equivalent of the end of the world.
In this play, Doctor Who is both the least and most important thing in the world, a pernicious, damaging influence and the one thread of happiness in the mind of a monstrous old man who hurt everyone he touched but himself more than anyone. It’s a bitter, twisted little play, full of spite and heartbreak, but also surprisingly touching. Well worth seeking out.
Tomorrow, Melmoth (yay, more stories about people on their deathbeds! Don’t worry, after that it’ll be superheroes).
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ – Thicker Than Water
Apologies for the continued lack of posts – unfortunately I’ve had to work a lot of long days this week, as we’re preparing for a release. I’m going to try to get a few posts up this weekend, and while I’m away next week (on holiday with my family, with no net access) I’ll try to write a *lot* of stuff, so when I get back I’ll have a backlog to post.
The biggest problem with Paul Sutton’s Thicker Than Water is also its greatest strength, which is that it is explicitly part of a larger continuity, and the end of a ‘story arc’. As (in story terms) the last story to feature Dr Evelyn Smythe, it ties up details of her relationship with the Doctor. It’s a sequel to the earlier story Arrangements For War, where Evelyn’s reactions were based on the events of Project: Lazarus, which was in turn a sequel to Project: Twilight. Meanwhile, the emotional turning point of the last episode (which I won’t spoil for those who haven’t yet heard it) is a revelation about the events in a completely different set of stories – the Cyberman trilogy The Reaping, The Gathering and The Harvest, which were in themselves a series of stories involving three different Doctors in reverse-chronological order and…
You see what I mean?
Rather miraculously, the story still works as a decent adventure story without having heard these stories, and for the most part you can pick up what you need to know, but there are a few scenes in the last episode that pack a real punch when you’ve heard them but would just be confusing without it.
Overall, however, the story is extremely effective. Doing the ‘new companion meets an old one’ story a good few months before it happened in the nuWho episode School Reunion, and in a significantly more adult manner, one of the two main plots of this story involves the Doctor taking Melanie Knownasmel off to meet Evelyn, who he credits with having mellowed him and made him a more decent person, but who (it is revealed) he left in a somewhat petulant manner when she decided to marry.
The scenes between the Doctor and Evelyn are some of the best acting you’ll hear – especially at the end when Evelyn tells the Doctor (for the only time) “I love you”. It’s clear in context that she means it in a fatherly way – it’s also clear that he may have loved her in a somewhat different way. But the performances here are a world away from the mopey teenage angsting of the new show – these are very *grown-up* performances, Colin Baker’s Doctor clearly embarrassed by any kind of display of real emotion, his bumptiousness and bluster all shown as cover for a very restrained, repressed person who cares more than he ever dare let show. At their best (and they are at their best here) Colin Baker and Maggie Stables have a rapport completely unlike anything in TV Who – a genuinely adult, *real* relationship between characters who are real people. It’s very unfortunate that it was decided after this to reduce the number of stories featuring Evelyn (and the scripts for those with her in have been noticeably worse since this than the ones before it), as they’re really the only ones in which the Doctor has a truly adult relationship with his companion, and they’re all the better for it.
The main ‘adventure’ plot, on the other hand, is fairly easy to follow for even someone who knows little or nothing of Doctor Who. Doctor Who (the original show and spin-offs, but not the new series) was always about … well, ‘always’ is a big word… one of the most enduring themes of Doctor Who, from the very second story up until the last series, was the fight between small-l liberalism and fascism, specifically Nazism. Almost all the memorable stories in Doctor Who have been about this in some way , from the what-if-the-Nazis-won of The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, through the whole of Tom Baker’s first series, through Curse Of Fenric, with villains like the Sontarans being caricature German officers, only missing a monocle.
The audios have returned to this theme a few times – sometimes rather clumsily just having the Doctor fight some Nazis, as in Colditz, but often looking more at the moral issues involved. Davros, for example, is ‘about’ Holocaust denial. This story, in so far as it is ‘about’ anything (and for the most part it’s actually about the human relationships involved, rather than about the subject of the plot) is about the morality of using data from Nazi ‘experiments’ to save lives (see this link if you’re unaware of the debate about this, but be warned – some of the stuff described there would turn anyone’s stomach). Actually, the debate is twisted a couple of times in this for plot purposes – it’s not a straightforward morality tale – but it at least nods to the issues, which is more than many supposedly more thoughtful stories do.
So while by no means the best of the Baker Big Finish stories, this is a good, solid story, raised above what it should have been by the performances of the two leads (and despite Bonnie Langford’s equal billing here, it really is a Sixth Doctor and Evelyn story). The only real annoyance (at least if you’re familiar with the rest of the stories referenced) is that the science at the end is so poor – I for one would like to see a ban on the use of the term ‘DNA’ from all SF/fantasy/superhero stories. DNA DOES NOT DO WHAT YOU THINK IT DOES, SF WRITERS! Today alone, I have ingested chicken DNA, potato DNA, corn DNA, wheat DNA, cow DNA and probably the DNA of a few other species as well. I have not yet turned into a horrible chickpocowheacow , and nor would I have had I injected same directly into my veins. See also black holes (I’m looking at *you*, new Star Trek film).
In general, it’s far better to just use made-up nonsense terms if you’re doing made-up nonsense science – using the real terms won’t make any difference to anyone who doesn’t understand them, and will only remove any suspension of disbelief from those who do.
But that apart, this is definitely worth a listen for Baker and Stables’ performances, and I only hope Big Finish will soon start giving this pairing some more solid stories together.
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ 24 – Max Warp
I’m going to try to get back to doing these once a week, on Saturdays (because Saturday is the proper day for Doctor Who as everyone knows) .
Jonathan Morris’ Max Warp is one of the range of ‘Eighth Doctor And Lucie’ hour-long audios that Big Finish have been doing, initially for Radio 7 but more recently just for their own CD/download range. These were explicitly aimed at being a half-way house between the old and new series, so the format is that of the new series (single-episode stories that are self-contained for the most part but hint at ‘arcs’ that are resolved in ‘season finales’), there are few of the continuity-wank bits that sometimes infect the main Big Finish range, but it’s still recognisably ‘classic’ Who (as we are apparently obliged to call it) rather than nuWho.
This actually works rather well for the most part – while the Doctor is scripted more blokeishly than I would like, in what I presume is a nod to the new series (he speaks in one story of a Time Ring being ‘a bit bling for me’ and has an obsession with Liverpool Football Club), McGann invests the role with enough Doctorishness that it’s still recognisably the same character that was in the original series, and I *like* self-contained shortish stories that don’t require you to have a burning desire to know where the second-in-command at Global Chemicals disappeared to half-way through The Green Death (or whatever other continuity trivia some people bring themselves to care about).
The real downside of these shows is Lucie Miller, the Doctor’s companion, played by Sheridan Smith. She is the most irritating companion the Doctor has ever had – worse than Jo Grant and Melanie Knownasmel combined, if you can believe that.
Now, this is not for the reason that some have complained about online – the character’s working-class Merseyside accent. Complaints about the character for that reason have rather nasty classist and regionalist bases that I think should be done away with – I certainly don’t think the Doctor would have those biases. (If nothing else, the Doctor’s clearly a Northerner himself – while they are all speaking more-or-less RP, the fourth and eighth Doctors have Scouse accents, the sixth has a hint of Manchester, the seventh is Scottish (and you can’t get much further North than that) and you can place the Ninth Doctor – should you wish to count him – almost to the street in Salford). It’s the way the character is written that is unpleasant.
She’s portrayed as the kind of person who thinks they’re clever and funny but knows nothing and seems not especially willing to learn. The kind who’ll turn anything into a rather dismissive joke rather than try to understand it. It’s actually a very strong characterisation – Lucie is clearly a real person – she’s just the kind of person I want nothing to do with, so having her along on the adventure isn’t a good thing from my point of view.
Specifically, she seems like the kind of person whose presence on QI makes you know the show is going to be a rubbish one – like Jimmy Carr, Jo Brand or Jeremy Clarkson. And Clarkson is very much on topic for this story, as it’s in great part a parody of Top Gear, featuring Graeme Garden as ‘Geoffrey Vantage’, a ‘politically incorrect’ tight-jeans-and-bald-patch presenter of a show about spaceships, Max Warp, that becomes the centre of a murder investigation when one of the co-presenters, ‘the Ferret’ dies in a crash in suspicious circumstances.
On my first listen to this I found it very enjoyable indeed (and Jennie, if you’ve not heard this one, you must) , although a couple of things irritated me, notably the totally unnecessary Hitch-Hikers quote/references (I think there should be at least a fifty year ban on anyone writing science fiction and referencing a Douglas Adams line in the belief that this makes their writing as good as Adams’ – all it does is drag Adams’ work down by association and humourless repetition, devaluing the work they claim to enjoy). The plot also doesn’t actually play fair (or, indeed, make much sense at all) as a whodunnit – but that’s OK, because it’s still fun to listen along to.
But on a repeated listen, I noticed a curious thing – this story is a parody of a British TV institution, with a whodunnit plotline, where the TV show exists in-story and is being used as part of a peace initiative, but is being disrupted by the murders. It involves one of the presenters of the show being a disguised secret agent, has an irritating assistant and stars Graeme Garden. It’s a remake of Bang Bang A Boom!
As a story in itself it’s probably better than the earlier one – more tightly-focussed, less broadly farcical, but still light-hearted and fun. But it’s so similar to the earlier story that one can hardly believe no-one noticed and said ‘hang on, we’ve done this before’, so it has to be docked points just for not even being original within the Big Finish audios. It’s still an enjoyable listen, and one of the better McGann audios, but not a patch on the earlier story.
ETA I’ve just realised that this is written by the same person who wrote Flip-Flop , yet while that one was (as Alex put it) “written as if Jonny had just been consoling himself after a bad break-up with a diet of nothing but the Daily Mail. ” and an anti-immigration rant worthy of the BNP or racist UKIP themselves, this one, from a few years later, is internationalist in outlook and makes fun of Vantage for justifying his obnoxious views as being ‘politically incorrect’ (when the earlier story was a Clarksonesque attack on ‘political correctness’). Very odd…
Tomorrow I’ll be doing two comics posts – one on Seaguy and one on Batman and Robin. See you then.
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ – Helicon Prime
Yes, I’m going to start doing these again – and I hope to get them back to something like weekly posting as well.
As some of you will have noticed, I’ve not posted as much in recent weeks – that’s because I’ve been doing a lot more stuff offline, and so haven’t had quite the online time I normally have. One of those things was on Sunday, when I attended my first ever Doctor Who convention (I’m not much of a one either for social events or organised fandom) – a one-day affair at the Fab Cafe in Manchester. Now, if you’d followed this on Twitter, you would have thought this was the Black Hole of Calcutta, but slightly less pleasant. In fact it was just a typically cramped small venue with a broken hand-drier in the gents’ toilet.
A lot of the fan complaints just seemed to me to be totally missing the point – if you’d told me when I was ten years old “You know, one day you’ll get to meet two Doctors and four companions on the same day!” my reaction would not have been “well, I’d like to do that, but not if I have to wipe my hands dry on my trousers after washing them”.
But worse fan entitlement was the complaints that the same anecdotes were being told by the guests as they always tell. Now the clue there is ‘always’. If you know, in advance, that, say, Colin Baker is going to make the same jokes he’s made before, then if you’re tired of them, just don’t go. Don’t go, laugh sycophantically, then complain about it behind the man’s back. These people (and the line-up was exceptional – Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Nicola Bryant, Sophie Aldred, Mark Strickson and Frazer Hines, plus the Big Finish people, including Lisa Bowerman) are talking about jobs they had for three years or so, and they’ve been talking about them for twenty to forty years. How many different anecdotes could anyone have about a job they did for a few years twenty years ago?
Some of what they said was familliar to me from interviews and so on, but enough was fresh that I was entertained, and I shall keep it fresh by the simple expedient of not going along to see the same people tell the same stories every few weeks.
The reason I bring it up is that the bonus tracks to this audio, Helicon Prime, include an interview with Frazer Hines where he tells exactly the same stories about working with Patrick Troughton as he told on Sunday, and I would hate anyone to undergo the terrible torment and suffering of having to hear someone tell the same anecdote twice, and have to pay for it.
Helicon Prime by Jake Elliott is one of a low-budget series of single-CD adventures that Big Finish do called the Companion Chronicles. As the first three Doctors are, unfortunately, all dead, and as Tom Baker wants nothing to do with Big Finish, the only way to tell new stories featuring the first four Doctors is to do what they do in these stories – take a supporting character, usually a companion, and have them tell the story in first person.
The results are closer to talking books than to the radio drama that the main Big Finish line resembles, though they do include sound effects and there’s usually a second actor to fill in one supporting role.
In this case the story is being read by Frazer Hines, in character as Jamie McCrimmon, the Second Doctor’s companion, and features Suzanne Procter. Hines actually does an excellent job of imitating Troughton, when reading the Doctor’s lines – in context it’s Jamie telling the story and imitating the Doctor, but it works.
The story itself is just a pleasant little nothing, a pastiche of the stories of the time – the Big Finish people at the convention the other day said that the brief for this one had been to ‘make it sound black and white’, and it does – the plotline (what is the sinister truth behind an unexplained death on a resort planet?) is exactly the sort of thing they would have done in the sixties (it’s actually more a Hartnell type story than a Troughton one, because the Troughton stories were almost all ‘monster’ stories, which this isn’t, but it doesn’t seem out of place for the second Doctor and Jamie). The descriptions manage to conjure up a sense of place very well – rather better, in fact, than many of the regular Big Finish audios, as Hines can just read out a description of the people or surroundings – and while Hines does have a couple of duff line reads, there are surprisingly few for what is essentially a solo performance.
The only problem with it is an unavoidable one. The character of Jamie McCrimmon is not meant to be especially articulate (and, depending on the writer, he’s sometimes characterised as actually stupid, though I think the character works better when he’s resourceful and quick on the uptake but ignorant). Here, he has to be the narrator of the entire story which, given that this is not some avant-garde experimental piece, means he has to have a much larger working vocabulary, and a much better turn of phrase, than the character ever had on TV. (Part of me would almost like to see what could have been done by having Jamie tell the story while being characterised as he was on TV – I’m imagining the story told now in something like the way Alan Moore wrote the first chapter of Voice Of The Fire…)
So if I listen to this as Frazer Hines reading a Doctor Who story, it’s entertaining, but if I try to think of it as Jamie McCrimmon telling the story I keep getting pulled out of it.
The story itself is nothing special, but it’s nicely characterised – the relationship between the Second Doctor and Jamie is captured perfectly – and if you’re a lover of the all-too-few Troughton-era stories we still have and want more, this isn’t a bad substitute, But at half the length of a normal Big Finish story it can’t be anything like as ambitious as the regular series, so go into this expecting an enjoyable, fluffy piece of entertainment, rather than a great work of art, and you won’t be disappointed.
Unless, of course, you’re the kind of person who’s heard it all before…
Edited to add
Just a little extra here. Once again, I’m getting people coming to my blog searching for ‘Nicola Bryant’ along with various sexual keywords. I usually find that quite amusing, if nothing else because there could be nothing less sexy than my blog, except possibly my body. However, someone at the con asked Ms Bryant if she’d consider posing for a ‘lad mag’ (for those who aren’t British, these are soft-core pornographic titles aimed at people too scared to buy anything harder). This kind of thing, to my mind, crosses the line into sexual harassment, and while Ms Bryant was polite, if clearly embarassed, I won’t be. That person is presumably quite likely to be one of the people who arrives at my blog through those search terms, and I’d just like to say to you “Fuck off and die, you festering wart on the scrotum of humanity. Publicly humiliating someone just because she happens to be a good-looking woman is not the behaviour of a civilised human being, and by doing so you have waived your right to be treated as one.”
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ 21 – The StagePlays
Well, I know it’s been a little more than a week… in fact some pedants might say it’s been closer to a month… since I did one of these (just as some might say that I still owe a proper Final Crisis summing up) but to make up for that I am going to review (albeit in less detail than usual) three newish Big Finish adventures.
Last year, Big Finish decided to produce audio adaptations of the three official Dalek stage plays that had been produced over the years, sticking as closely to the original scripts as possible and, where possible, using original cast members. As two of these were by Terrance DIcks, and the third by Terry Nation and David Whittaker, you would be forgiven for not going in with the highest expectations. But as you can currently download all three for twenty pounds, I thought I’d give them a go.
The first to be released, and by far the worst, is Dicks’ The Ultimate Adventure from 1989. This was originally staged with Jon Pertwee in the lead, with Colin Baker taking over in the later versions, and here Baker reprises the part, along with a companion with a rrreedeeculuz Frrrainch eczent. Unfortunately, the part doesn’t seem to sit right with him here – possibly because the show was originally written for Pertwee’s very different Doctor, or possibly because Dicks had never written for Baker (the sixth Doctor was the first one never to have a TV story written by Dicks (he never wrote for Hartnell, either, but did write the First Doctor in The Five Doctors)).
The story itself is a pantomime rather than a serious story, with several terrible songs (“Business Is Business” being the least-worst, but it should have been cut to roughly a fifth of its present length), a plot involving Daleks and Cybermen teaming up with mercenaries to take over the earth for what I’m sure must be good and adequate reasons, and the Doctor working for Mrs Thatcher. I imagine it must have been great fun for any young children in the audience at the time, but it’s inessential at best. Baker does his best, but this is quite weak stuff.
Doctor Who And The Daleks In Seven Keys To Doomsday, another DIcks story, this time from 1974, is much better. Written at a time when Dicks was the script editor for the show, it very much has the feel of late Pertwee about it (the original stage show was on during the gap between Pertwee’s last episode and Tom Baker’s first, and starts with a regeneration sequence), though both stage show and audio release starred Trevor Martin as the Doctor. If you listen to this and The Ultimate Adventure back-to-back you may get a sense of deja vu, as a couple of plot points (notably a companion getting into a Dalek travel-machine and using a handy ‘make your voice sound Dalekky’ machine that the Doctor just happens to have on him) are reused. But the difference is that here there *is* a plot. Not a hugely interesting or original one – the Doctor and his companions turn up on an alien world where they have to recover the Seven MacGuffins Of Doom before the Daleks can, aided by some locals (one of whom is a traitor!) and hindered by some spiderlike creatures called Clawrentulars.
It’s a thin plot, and its not helped by one of the companions (Jimmy, the other being called Jenny) being absolutely insufferable. Some of this is intentional – the Doctor gets exasperated at him on a regular basis – but some of it is down to actor Joe Thompson’s utterly horrible Mockney (it may be his real accent, in which case I feel sorry for the poor man, but I doubt it…). However, the plot suffices, and the play is made enjoyable by Trevor Martin’s frankly wonderful performance. At times he sounds scarily like Patrick Troughton, and while his Doctor is written like Pertwee’s, Martin plays it much more like the first two Doctors. He inhabits the role in a way that few others have (I’d put him behind Hartnell, Troughton and the Bakers, but ahead of Pertwee, Davison, McCoy and McGann). I’d be very interested in hearing more of Martin as the Doctor – maybe in Big Finish’s Unbound series?
The final one, though the first to be staged, is 1965′s Curse Of The Daleks by Terry Nation and David Whittaker. As you would expect from those writers at that date, the science is wrong, it’s laughably sexist, it makes no sense if you examine it for a moment – and it’s absolutely great. Even though this story doesn’t feature the Doctor at all, being the first of Nation’s increasingly desperate attempts to cash in on Dalekmania separately from the show, it has much of the feeling of the early series.
This is possibly explainable by the fact that while Terrance Dicks said he had to learn to write for the stage after having written for the TV, early-60s Doctor Who was essentially done as live, at a time when the medium was essentially broadcast theatre rather than the miniature cinema it later attempted to be (and Dicks’ vision of the Doctor was always more cinematic than his predecessors and successors on the original series). Nation in particular had started out as a writer of stage shows, and the character of Rocket Smith (a name which now makes me think of Computer Jones or Synthesiser Patel) has a lot of the speech rhythms of Tony Hancock, for whose stage show Nation was a writer before writing The Daleks.
Curse of the Daleks is also helped by the fact that, due to its writers’ deaths, it has not been updated for the audio release, so Nicholas Briggs reads the stage directions for purely visual events. This gives it the feel of a partly-dramatised audiobook of a Target novelisation, which again makes it feel more like ‘proper Doctor Who’ to me than the other stories which actually have the Doctor in them. As a return trip to Skaro, it’s well worth a listen, even though it’s just good pulpy adventure in an early-60′s Eagle manner.
None of these are up to even Big Finish’s slightly diminished recent standards, let alone their best work, but given that you can download all three for not much more than the cost of a single download of one of their other audios, they’re definitely worth a shot – even the worst has fun moments in it.
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ 20: The Fires Of Vulcan
My definition of ‘week’ is getting quite elastic, isn’t it? Oh well, this is a series about a time traveller, after all…
One of the things Big Finish have always done well that the TV series never did much of after William Hartnell is the pure ‘historical’ story. Stories like The Marian Conspiracy or Son Of The Dragon, which put the Doctor and his companions into Earth’s past without any alien invaders or mad scientists or monsters, have actually provided many of the best moments in the audios, and much of the identity of the series. Big Finish has been at its best when exploring genres that 80s Doctor Who never had time for, and at its worst when trying to do ‘Doctor Who stories’.
With that in mind it’s rather odd that their stories with the Seventh Doctor, where they have the most room to manoeuvre and do different stories, have almost all been pastiches of the New Adventures books and/or of the last series, and have been generally the worst of their stories by a long way (the McGann stories have often been dull, but there’s not been a McGann as fanwanky as Master or outright repellent as Flip Flop).
However, rather oddly, the stories featuring the Seventh Doctor and Mel, which one would imagine to be the worst of the bunch (having seen the truly awful TV episodes in which the two team up, easily the worst period of the show’s history by a very long way) break this tendency and are actually often enjoyable (except the repulsive Flip Flop…)
Fires Of Vulcan, by Steve Lyons, is easily one of the better Seventh Doctor audios for these reasons, and because unlike so many of them it’s *about* something. Actually, it’s about many things – all of them Doctor Who perennials. By dropping the Doctor into Pompeii on the day of the eruption of Vesuvius, a day when the Doctor already knows his TARDIS will get buried in the ash for the next 2000 years, Lyons gets to rub two of the oldest morals in Doctor Who – “You can’t change history, not one line” and “Where there’s life there’s hope” – together and see what sparks fly off. A little ‘you must take responsibility for your own actions and not stand around waiting for a god to save you” is also thrown in for good measure.
What’s impressive about this is that there are no truly unsympathetic characters here – the characters who do things we would think of as ‘evil’ are usually behaving correctly according to the morality of the time. The gladiator who tries to kill the Doctor because the Doctor has dishonoured him does so because the ‘dishonour’ could have very real consequences for someone who relies on the goodwill of the public to stay alive after losing a fight – consequences the Doctor completely overlooks in his willingness to trick and humiliate him publicly (although of course the Doctor knows that there are no long-term consequences to interference in Pompeii).
The story is a genuinely good one, with the companion for once taking the lead while the Doctor mopes about going ‘we’re all doomed! Doomed!’ and persuading the Doctor eventually that it is possible to save themselves. Interestingly, the Doctor asks Mel if they should stay as soon as he realises where they are, saying it must be her choice but not giving her the information he has (that the TARDIS will be discovered buried there in 1980) and it’s her decision to stay that convinces him everything has gone wrong. This suggests that in the Doctor Who ‘universe’ ‘free will’ and possession of information are antithetical – predestination exists for anyone who has information about the future, but not for anyone else. This would fit with a lot of my own fanwanky ideas about the TARDIS and time travel (as well as the ideas in the About Time books, which I’ve been reading obsessively for the last few weeks) and provides for many story possibilities (ones which have unfortunately not been followed up).
Apparently the ‘canonicity’ of this story is in doubt now because of an episode from the last series of nuWho, which featured nuDoctor going to Pompeii himself. While this was apparently the best episode of the series (according to Alex) and was also the only episode I considered watching from the last series (purely because it was a crossover with the Cambridge Latin Course), if it means people are less likely to bother with this story because it’s no longer ‘canon’ (and that sort of thing does bother people – see the endless comment thread of doom here ) then I think it’s a real shame, as this is far and away my favourite piece of work featuring McCoy’s Doctor.
Off delivering Focuses now, Superman Beyond 3D review when I get back. In the meantime, I’ve joined that Twitter thing that all the cool kids are doing. For I am down with the kids and their hippity hoppity music and their emu haircuts and their hula hoops. If you are interesting in following me as I twoot, then my username is stealthmunchkin. Not sure how much (if at all) I’ll use the thing though…
A Big Finish A Week 19 – The Game
Sport, sport, masculine sport, equips a young man for society…
There are a number of cliches about Doctor Who fans that happen to be true. They’re not *as* true now as they used to be (a lot of people now who define themselves as Doctor Who fans are ‘cult TV’ fans generally, the kind of people who refer to themselves as ‘geeks’, and there’s a large overlap between the fandom of the new show and of programs like Buffy The Vampire Slayer), but even so if you look at Doctor Who fans between the ages of (roughly) 30 and 60 you’ll find that an astonishingly high proportion of them are gay (or in some way of an alternative sexuality), members of the Liberal Democrats, middle class, very interested in computers, readers of 2000AD, or all of the above.
And one thing that unites almost all Doctor Who fans is a healthy distaste for sport. This is partly because the kind of kids who liked Doctor Who were also the kind of kids who got picked last for every team (The Odd Boy sums up many Who fans very well, though truth to tell most of us were more likely to be reading Terrance Dicks than Mallarme) but also because the whole ethos of Doctor Who was one of individualism, eccentricity and a healthy disrespect for authority. While the Doctor occasionally enjoyed a gentle game of cricket, and I could imagine him playing tennis, the very idea of him ever even considering watching a football match seems absurd (the audios have the McGann Doctor supporting Liverpool, which also happens to be the team I claim to support if ever asked by the kind of person who can’t accept that someone can have male genitals and *not* like football, but it doesn’t ring true to me. On the other hand, I *could* see the Doctors in the new series being footballists quite easily). Football, and most other team sports, seems to be about unifying people into a mob, and the Doctor always hated mobs. So with very few exceptions, someone *either* has a favourite Patrick Troughton story, or a favourite football team, but rarely both.
Under those circumstances, it seems surprising that no-one had thought to do a parody of football in Doctor Who before The Game. But listening to it, one can see why.
The problem is, firstly, that the plot is cliched beyond belief. A war being waged in the form of a lethal spectator sport? Aliens betting on it and rigging the results? It’s just obvious stuff. So it has to rely on the execution to a greater extent than most other stories, but instead this one coasts on the assumption that all Who fans hate football, and doesn’t really do anything especially interesting. Some of the plotting is absolutely appaling – at one point the Doctor is in a one on one match with someone, and essentially just says “No! Killing is wrong!” before a cliffhanger where the other player announces he’s going to kill him. Immediately at the start of the next episode, the other player, who has killed a hundred people before this and just announced his intention to kill the Doctor, suddenly realises that in fact killing *is* wrong, as if no-one had ever mentioned this before. No reason for his change of heart is given, and there’s no build up for this, just “I’m going to kill you” “But killing is bad!” “Oh, is it? Oh, all right then…”
Particularly galling are the sections where the sportspeople are talking. Once again, Big Finish do their thing of assuming that a working class accent is innately humorous, this time having all the sportspeople speak in a RADA attempt at estuary English. This of course means that the actors are so busy trying to keep their accents straight they don’t spend any time actually giving a decent performance. But given that *all* the people who speak with a working-class or foreign accent are thugs and killers, whereas the Doctor, his companion, and the chief peacemaker all speak in RP, there’s definitely an undercurrent of classism here. Most Who fans are middle class (I’m not , or at least don’t think of myself as being, coming from a relatively poor family) and there does seem to be a definite undertone here of “watch out, the chavs are coming to get you!”
I also feel sorry for poor Sarah Sutton – despite the companion’s role being larger in this one than in most of the other Big Finish audios (and *far* larger than almost all the TV episodes) she’s not given anything like an actual character, just going around being exposited to and picking up bits of evidence – a walking plot point. She does her best with the material she’s given, but she’s not given very much.
The saving graces here are Peter Davison and William Russel. Russel (who played Ian Chesterton, one of the companions in the very first series of Doctor Who, and who was actually in the show even before the Doctor himself) here plays an old man who has known the Doctor in his own past – but who the Doctor is meeting for the first time in his timeline. Russel is simply superb as the rather doddering but well-intentioned Lord Carlisle, and Davison also turns in his usual excellent performance.
It’s odd in fact that the audios haven’t caused as much of a reappraisal of Davison as they have of Colin Baker – possibly this is because Davison was more respected to start with, or possibly it’s just because Baker’s performance is bigger and more exuberant than Davison’s, but either way it’s a shame. While Baker is my favourite audio Doctor, his performances on the audios aren’t that much better than his performances on the TV – it’s just that he finally has scripts that match the quality of his performances. Davison, on the other hand, improved immeasurably in the role between his TV appearances and the audios, making me wish for a series with the Doctor played by Davison in his fifties rather than his thirties…
The Game isn’t terrible, but it feels calculated, like someone deliberately wrote it aimed at a specific demographic, and that gives it a rather disquieting feeling – and it’s not good enough in any other respect to get over that. It’s worth a listen if you like Davison, but it’s in the lower ranks of Big Finish’s output.
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