Late Night Shopping (Short Trips Rarities).

Audio  It's over twenty years since this project began to cover everything featuring the Eighth Doctor starting with the novels but due to one thing and another, I've fallen behind, a whole pile of downloads and CDs to catch up on.  But even if I had been keeping up with release dates and schedules, I'd never be completely up to date because of the unavailability of four audio Short Trips which were included as bonuses to Big Finish monthly range subscribers on a semi-annual basis from 2014 onwards.  Some of the others have been made available as stand-alone releases in the meantime, but Late Night Shopping, The Caves of Erith, Tuesday and An Ocean of Sawdust stubbornly remained at the bottom of the checklist.

But it's 2026 and since we'll be lucky if humanity reaches 2027, Big Finish have read the room and all four have been released as a reasonably priced boxed set.  As Nick Briggs (creative director at Big Finish) says:  

"As part of our McGannuary jollity, we're re-releasing these four great Short Trips, previously only available to subscribers of our very first Doctor Who audio range which ran for 22 years and 275 stories. We wanted others to be able to luxuriate in the sheer McGann-ness of them! And with their single narrator style and modest duration, they're ideal to listen to on the way to and from work, or short trips - see what I did there? - to relatives and friends."

The first, Late Night Shopping, is a very short trip at roughly fifteen minutes.  I can see now why Big Finish decided this play in particular couldn't be released as one of the original wave of stand alone Short Trips rarities - £2.99 would have been a lot to pay for what amounts to something which would be at home as a sketch on Comic Relief Night.  

It's delightful.  Attack of some killer tomatoes in the aisle of a supermarket with the Doctor utilising his culinary abilities to save the planet.  If it had been filmed to be watched between charity films, you could well imagine various previous Taskmaster contestants filling out the rest of the cast as the lonely enamoured shopper and harassed supermarket employees.  Matt Fitton's textual efficiency amusingly sketches out the scene, aided by the old Who trick of putting fantastical scenes in mundane environments and helpful spot effects or Foley work.  Can anyone tell me if these and the dizzily camp remix of the title music were on the original release?

All of which said, for much of the short runtime I was distracted by how much the reader, Hugh Ross, an actor whose CV stretches all the way back to the late 60s but has managed to dodge Doctor Who until this recording (despite appearing in numerous wilderness years substitutes like Sea of Souls and Invasion: Earth), sounds like the late Peter Jones, the Voice of the Book in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.  At one point the Doctor says he's going to fry something in "some nice hot olive oil" and it's impossible not to hear an echo of the Guide entry for the Infinite Improbability Drive, "a nice hot cup of tea".  With that in mind, you can imagine what his vocal characterisation of Lucie Miller sounds like.  Incredible stuff.

Placement:  Arbitrarily next to All The Fun of the Fair towards the start of Lucie's second season.