Nicholas Briggs' The Dalek Contract & The Final Phase.

Audio Apologies again for the lateness of this opinion indeed two opinions since I’m writing about two Big Finish releases together, but with my plan to watch all of Doctor Who grasping towards the Key To Time season a few weeks ago, I decided to wait and listen to them within sequence providing the opportunity to see just how authentic these new episodes are in comparison the era they’re meant to be emulating. As I might have expected, and as I’d assumed based on the rest of the newer season, the answer veers wildly between not at all and quite a bit and often in the same scene. But as I’ve discussed in previous months, this season has been less about recreating a 1970s tea time and more about offering Mary Tamm the opportunity to add colour and complexity to her incarnation of Romana, which this certainly does.

Cuthbert, the Whoniverse’s Rupert Murdoch analogy is back and continuing his time experiments, this time aided as the title to The Dalek Contract suggests by the classic era pepperpots, who the audience, the Doctor, Romana and K9 all know have a different agenda, not that we or they could convince him of it. Whatever he’s planning is so huge that it’s shifted the planet Proxima Major out of its usual orbit, making the atmosphere barely habitable for its inhabitants who’re either in Dalek internment camps or split into rival factions fighting for the future of the planet. As The Final Phase begins, our heroes are right in the thick of it and the fate of all reality hangs in the balance with just a couple of Time Persons, a robot dog and a blue box holding things together.

In reality, and there is a lot of talking about reality, there isn’t an awful lot which is new here. Much like the first Cuthbert two parter, this is pretty generic stuff, but like the first Cuthbert two parter that’s not necessarily in a bad way. As with those stories, and for reasons we’ll return to in the next paragraph, this is comfort Who, something which purposefully takes few risks with its storytelling and leaves the listener with a (toothy) grin at the end. But there are moments when this listener groaned at that or the other reveal, the Cuthbert and the Daleks plans, so carefully withheld for much of the story, are finally spelled out, not least because the narrative prevarication leading up to them means that there simply isn’t enough time to properly investigate what could have been their nonetheless potentially interesting implications.

Which leads the other usual caveat, that as is also so often the case with Doctor Who, it’s the incidental pleasures which make this worthwhile. For one thing, we finally have K9 versus the Daleks for the first time in the franchise’s history (I think) after Terry Nation apparently balked at the idea for Destiny of the Daleks and the near miss in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End and it is a joyous piece of acting from John Leeson and Briggs which just about makes up for us not being able to have seen the superimposed laser beam taking pot shots at some silvery or gold plywood on screen. Plus a sudden upswing in the fourth Doctor’s compassion, something which I’ve discovered is largely absent from his television portrayal in this era, which tends towards the big picture at the expense of smaller acts of kindness.

But melancholically, for the most part these four episodes are about Romana’s reason for staying in the TARDIS at the end of their moribund mission to collect the space trinket and travel the universe with the Doctor, bridging the gap between seasons sixteen and seventeen. This is one of Mary Tamm’s best performances as she comes to terms with the fact that for all their needling, she’s grown to respect the Doctor quite a bit and even if their flight from the Black Guardian makes it extremely difficult for her to return to Gallifrey, that she’d quite like to knock around with him for a while. Unfortunately we won’t now get to enjoy those adventures. Would they have taken the opportunity to hint towards her fate as outlined in the Gallifrey spin-offs, of the Pandora influence? We’ll never know.

Similarly, as you might expect given the richness of his characterisation we may never discover the fate of Cuthbert either, which must certaif inly have been a plan for future seasons, unless he returns to fight some later incarnation of the Doctor or Tom and Lalla ever record together however unlikely that always is. At a time when the new series seems entirely disinterested with the idea of having too many arch enemies or megalomaniac antagonists, David Warner’s mogul has demonstrated that it is possible to produce a figure which is a match for the Doctor and with an injection of social commentary. His entire disinterest in anyone but himself even to the point of persistently getting Romana’s name wrong will be familiar to anyone who anyone who keeps up with the gossip websites.

So here we are at the end of another season of Fourth Doctor stories and as I predicted they’ve been a mixed blessing in that they’ve shown that the first Romana is a character which can be extended beyond the season she was invented for but who’s longevity has tragically been cut short. Asked to choose, it’s the standalone stories which have offered the most pleasure, and the memory of sitting in Starbucks hooting into a Gingerbread Latte during The Auntie Matter is still very special. Who would have thought, back in the late 70s, that thirty years later the same actors would be recreating the same characters for an appreciative public and in some ways utilising material of even greater complexity, wit and intelligence and that we’d be able to enjoy it miles away from our living rooms?

Doctor Who: The Dalek Contract and Doctor Who: The Final Phase by Nicholas Briggs are on sale now. Review copies supplied.

[Incidentally Big Finish have recently announced that the first fifty of their releases, from the turn of the millenium, are to be permanently reduced, cds £5 (while stocks last) and downloads £2.99. The bargains start here.]

WHO 50: 1995: Managra.

Books One of the inherent problems with being a retrospective fan, or someone who’s returning to Doctor Who after an especially large gap, isn’t just the volume of stories to potentially catch up with, but actually being able to access them.

If they’re audio stories, that’s generally easy. Anything produced by Big Finish under the Doctor Who license is still available from Big Finish and AudioGo have a pretty good track recorded of releasing and re-releasing on cd and download even material originally released on cassette, even as part of the compilation Tales from the TARDIS (here, here).

But the books? Good luck. A search through eBay reveals a few of them, and a glance at the adverts in Doctor Who Magazine suggests there is some old stock available, but it’s not everything. Some texts are being republished as ebooks, but again there’s no particular strategy to this.

The prices, oh, the prices. Like comics, Doctor Who on the page has largely been an ephemeral work, and publication schedules, popularity and essentialness mean that some books are a couple of pounds but many are, really, really expensive, especially the Virgin publications from the 1990s.

Which makes the process of constructing collections of these books, to some extent reconstructing history like the eponymous antagonist of Stephen Marley’s 1995 novel Managra, a near impossibility. Or at the very least a deeply involving project.

For those of us without the funds, it’s a case of scouring charity shops and second hand book emporiums, glancing along shelves and hoping to spot the familiar spines, checking our lists, because we’re the kinds of people who carry lists of these things in our pockets to see if we already have them. Most often we do. Sometimes, oh sometimes …

The process has been made even harder since the show returned because there are so many of us doing the same thing, or less likely to part with our collections for nominal prices or to simply give them away to charity. Plus most of the Who books in these shops now tend to be nuWho spin-offs. Which we still buy anyway if we need to. We have lists of those too.

I found my copy of Managra in the second-hand bookshop on Mount Pleasant in Liverpool in the early noughties. As you can see from the photos its seen better days, its previous owner having decided to “protect” it by wrapping it in cellotape.





On the inside front page it’s been priced at £2 in pencil. A bargain. Though it’s worth noting that they’re going for an average of about £4 on ebay now which is nearer to the cover price. Not all of the Virgin Missing Adventures are that cheap.

Incidentally, I have read Managra, I read it when I bought it so my memory of its receded in the excitement of watching the new series. My plan is to read my way through all of these missing adventures from Virgin and the BBC knitted together with the TARGET novelisations in chronological order when I have them all, one grand project leading to another.

“When I have them all.”

Jonathan Morris’s Phantoms of the Deep.

Audio Turns out I’m slight behind in reviewing this series of Tom Baker stories by at least a month, but oddly for what’s supposed to be an instantaneous medium, it’s quite nice to follow something akin to Doctor Who Magazine’s publication schedule, especially since there can sadly only ever be a finite number of these adventures for the Fourth Doctor and the first Romana now and it seems a shame to blast through them. So I’ll talk about this month’s release The Dalek Contract in a little while, if that’s ok. Not that there’s much that you can do if it isn’t.

Release date related issues are pertinent to Jonathan Morris’s Phantoms of the Deep, a story set partially on a submarine which despite having been recorded a few years in advance found itself coincidentally joining the canon just a couple of weeks after the television series broadcast Cold War another story set on a submarine. It’s to Doctor Who’s credit that they both manage to tell completely different stories, with different sets of character types and no sense of déjà vu so we’re not left trying to decide which is our favourite of the “submarine” stories.

Still hiding from the Black Guardian, the TARDIS sinks itself in the depths of the Earth’s ocean in the Mariana Trench, and as usual because it’s a surprisingly small galaxy, they’re visited by an deep sea exploratory vehicle with the usual questions about what they’re doing there which before they can be answered are quickly superseded by some other questions about why there are super-intelligent squid warning them off their land, an ancient submarine, and a general sense that there’s something in the deep which as curious about them as they are about its habitat.

Listeners with even longer memories than last month will notice that all of this is at least superficially similar to the radio Torchwood episode Submission, which also had sea creatures in the Mariana Trench and with which it also shares the sense of dipping into the unknown, of the darkness, of humanity realising that there are just as many mysteries in its own oceans as in the galaxies overhead. More than usual we’re listening intently to the exposition of the characters as they conjure the world, their words mirroring the glimpses of abstract object hidden in the watery shadows.

As such this is a deliberately more sober entry than Morris’s first story for this series The Auntie Matter, toning down his Adamsalike tendencies, not that they’re turned off completely, what with all the hyper intelligent sea life swimming about. There are moments when the Doctor is genuinely frightened and Tom’s given the opportunity to play this little heard side of his incarnation, who on television at least, tended to joke his way through anything, even when he was being electrocuted and threatened or his companions were experiencing the same treatment.

Along with some Big Finish regulars who’re predictably well chosen by director Ken Bentley, the headline casting this time is the Borg Queen herself, Alice Krige. Her performance is impeccable as she takes full advantage of her character’s development which through Morris’s clever writing only really makes sense after the play is completed, this being a sentence which also only make sense once you’ve listened to the story too. That’s something this story does have over Cold War, where David Warner’s parallel scientist's motivations were never fully explained.

Jamie Robertson’s sound design atmospherically conjures the noisy emptiness ocean, his spot music sounding like a Dudley Simpson composition given some Murray Gold bells and guitars. K9’s back too, though his voice has been treated with a strange crackle, perhaps to indicate the recent repair cycle. Another strength of the story is that it also finds something especially interesting for the tin dog to do in a way which glances forwards to some of his previously released Big Finish adventures, especially the Gallifrey spin-off series in its early days.

If Phantoms of the Deep doesn’t quite have the buzz of some of Jonathan Morris’s best stories, his novels Touched by an Angel and The Tomorrow Windows, and indeed The Auntie Matter which are still some of his masterworks, it’s probably not trying to be. With writers this prolific, there must be a drive towards stretching themselves into unexplored areas, different styles of writing, and that’s all to the good. It’s certainly set me up nicely for his Destiny of the Doctor story Babblesphere, which was out two months ago and I’ll which probably be getting around to in July.  At this rate.

John Dorney's The Justice of Jalxar.

Audio Henry Gordon Jago and Professor Lightfoot, how are you, how are you? Are you well? I’m sorry it’s been such a long time, since the second dvd release of The Talons of Weng-Chiang, but I’ve not had the funds to purchase your many boxed sets produced by Big Finish and although I do have your two Sixth Doctor stories downloaded, they’re sitting to one side until I’ve completed my Who rewatch like everything else that hasn’t been sent to as a review copy. Anyway, gentlemen, as I asked, how are you? You sound very well. Ebullient. Well set up as the classic Who equivalent of nuWho’s Vastra, Jenny and Strax. Now, wouldn’t that be a team up?

Anyway, so yes, having missed all of their other adventures, I’m visiting this reunion with the Fourth Doctor in much the same way as the Fourth Doctor, meeting some old friends who’ve been carrying on the good fight in mine and his absence. Set ten years after Talons they’re pressed into service to investigate the movements of The Pugalist, a kind of steampunk iteration of the Batman/Daredevil/Rorschach paradigm, scourge of the Victorian criminal underworld, dodging through shadows handing out justice via gadgets and toys aided by, as the cover and title rather give away, a giant robot with Dredd-like tendencies.

All of which suggests this is writer John Dorney simultaneously channelling Mark Gatiss, Robert Holmes and Alan Moore.  Listening to The Justice of Jalxar in the wake of The Crimson Horror, it’s interesting to see a similar structure present itself, independent adventurers quite capable of holding their own, becoming secondary characters when the title character of the series asserts himself (both of his cameos in The Sarah Jane Adventures did much the same thing). But there’s nothing foul about this; judging by the greenroom larks in the post match interviews at the end of the cd, everyone enjoyed this excuse for a reunion, no egos bruised.

Dorney’s previously written for the spin-off and his experience with the characters really shows in annunciating their strength. Jago, the showman even away from the theatre, entirely enchanted by Romana at least until it becomes apparent that she’s an independent woman not easily swayed by his complements. Lightfoot, the scientist, principled, muddling through, slightly in awe but never cynical about the magic which reveals itself to him. Their double act, thanks to performances of Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter is a staggering piece of alchemy and it’s a crime that it never was repeated on screen. Thank goodness for Big Finish.

As the story elaborates, Dorney cleverly makes sure that it’s not simply about The Pugalist as an entity but his crusade and we’re called upon to consider if the ends ever justify the means. Small parallel is made between the Doctor with his gadgets and this vigilante as both face justice of one sort of another and Tom is at the top his game as he keeps the tone of his performance light whilst underscoring the horror of what’s occurring. Paul Magrs’s Starfall and Mark Morris’s Mr Invincible cover strikingly similar ground and this finds itself roughly between the former’s comic book tendencies and the latter’s gritty (well, gritty for Torchwood) realism.

Of all the stories so far, The Justice of Jalxar almost completely jettisons any attempt at being a recreation of the era with a Murray Gold style orchestral soundtrack and some rather grim horror, which under the Whitehouse gaze simply wouldn’t have been allowed back in the 70s. Good. Rather like the old BBC Books, although there’s a place for recreation, the writer should be allowed to take his story where it needs to go, maintaining the spirit if not the form. Plus if the plan was to advertise the thrilling adventures of Jago & Lightfoot to new listeners this more than succeeds and once I can afford to, it’s journey I’ll be looking forward to taking.

 John Dorney's The Justice of Jalxar is out now.  Review copy supplied.

Why the Daleks failed.

WHO 50: 1981: The Keeper of Traken.

TV It’s the late nineties. I’m standing in the gift shop of the Doctor Who exhibition in Llangollen having spent the past couple of hours being smacked around the eyeballs with nostalgia wondering how it is that I’ve never visited before. My friends are waiting outside for me but I’ve realised I can’t leave without buying something.

The exhibition piggybacked on the side of Dapol’s factory, Dapol being the then current licensee for the action figures which they manufacture, just about, in conjunction with Hornby’s model railways. The displays inside the factory show an especially British mix of steam engines, public police call boxes and men in Edwardian frock coats.

But I don’t want any of that. I’ve already picked up an unpainted cast off moulding of the Seventh Doctor’s umbrella and that was enough for me. So after glancing around the shop at all the books (so many books), I decide to go to source and choose a video of one of the stories.

I select The Keeper of Traken, for no other reason than it is the cheapest at £7.99. Even to this day, when faced with a massive selection to choose from of whatever it is, I always tend to buy the cheapest because it saves me from making that selection. Plus it always tends to be what I can afford. I’m always poor.

During the transaction, the clerk asks me if I’ve enjoyed my day and I giddly set about describing all the things I’ve seen which he presumably already knows about because he works there. He asks me why I'm choosing Traken and I tell him I vaguely remember the statue thing on the cover. “The Melkur”, he says knowledgeably.

Then the conversation takes a curious turn. As he puts the video in a bag, and I don’t remember the details of how reach the subject, but I says it is a shame that the TV Movie with Paul McGann didn’t go to series.

Then he says something, which is the reason I remember this whole incident as vividly as this. He leans across the counter, conspiratorial like, and says, it’s coming back. I ask him what he means. They’re making new episodes he says and that I should watch out for them.

Before I can ask him anything else, another customer turns up behind me and he simply tells me to have a good day and turns his attention to them, leaving me with a mix of curiosity and ecstasy as I leave the shop. I remember repeating the news to my friends as we get in a car. Neither of them are too convinced.

Weeks, then months, and no public announcement of the return of Doctor Who, at least to television and to this day I’m not sure what he was referring to. Big Finish began releasing a couple of years later. I suppose it’s possible he was simply relaying the news of that from Doctor Who Magazine at a time when I wasn’t a reader.

But I was briefly given some idea of what it must have been like to be a proper fan during the wilderness years, when every rumour was pounced on as a small piece of hope that some day it might come back in some form, when even The Curse of the Fatal Death looked like an example of how to make it viable.

Watching The Keeper of Traken was the moment when it came back to me. I wasn’t a “proper” fan again yet, but it was enough to make me curious enough to want to watch plenty more of them and I did, recorded from UK Gold by my tolerant auntie, not everything, but enough for me to see what I was missing. Thanks Melkur.

WHO 50: 1980: State of Decay.

TV One of the more random pieces of old school merchandise in my collection is the Pickwick Talking Books audio release of a Terrance Dicks novelisation of State of Decay.

Here’s something which will date some readers. It was bought for me at the closing down sale at Blacklers, the department store in Great Charlotte Street where the Wetherspoons is now, along with a First Byte Joystick Interface for my Acorn Electron.

The TARDIS Datacore explains that my copy is the re-release which split the hour long reading across two cassettes. It also explains why some copies I’ve seen are only on one tape.

What it doesn’t tell me is how it happened. Given the history of Doctor Who, choosing the Vampire gothic State of Decay, the central story in the wider E-Space trilogy for this release is surprising.  It's usually Genesis of the Daleks.

Also surprising is that it isn’t some abridgement of the TARGET novelisation. It’s a completely different script from Dicks (who wouldn’t write the book version for another six months), which simplifies the story, reducing the participation of Adric (which is always to the good).

And who wrote the theme tune? A theme tune which isn’t the familiar Ron Grainer/Delia Derbyshire combo, but some kind of bouncy synth music which I can still dah-dee-dah through having listened to this audio book to death as a child.

When was it recorded? Tom left the role on screen in March 1981 so it must have been before then, but at least during the period when it's pretty much accepted he was psychologically done with the role having realised he and JNT would never see eye to eye.

Yet here he is putting in a professional and elegant vocal performance, even when handed Adric’s dialogue, in a format which would become the model for later audio books, its influence clear in the entire BBC range that was to come.

This was originally released in June 1981, which also looks like a bizarre piece of scheduling from today’s perspective when Eccleston merchandise was being pulled from the shelves almost as soon as he'd regenerated into Tennant.

Essentially, why? Do you know?

Nicholas Briggs's War Against the Laan.

Audio Potentially the least interesting element to notice about Nicholas Briggs's War Against the Laan, which is presumably why I thought it was worth mentioning first, is that it closes out a five-part Tom Baker story. After the first chunk of the narrative, The Sands of Life caught me off guard with its three slightly shorter episodes, I was all tucked up in bed awaiting another three more bursts of adventure, until some way into episode two/five, awaiting the inevitable build up to a cliffhanger I realised it wasn’t happening as the, spoiler alert, situation with dealt with, and the story itself giving way to about twenty minutes worth of interviews.

Is this the first five-part Tom Baker story? In theory Paul Magrs’s AudioGo series are five parters, though they’re more like five linked single episode stories. His television era was all four and six parters. Not that TSOL/WATL conforms to the usual five episode structure established in the Troughton era which amounted to a four parter with some extra running about and being captured in the middle. The first three and second two conform more clearly the split structure of The Seeds of Doom or the average nuWho two parter, each chunk dealing with the same story in a new locale, TSOL in the desert, WATL mostly in Cuthbert’s Conglomerate headquarters.

From the epic to the enclosed, Briggs steers us into the territory of Robert Sheerman’s Jubilee and so Dalek, as the Laan mother captured in the first chunk is subjected to horrific experiments in an attempt by Cuthbert to discover how he can “save” the Earth from them, even though those very experiments are simply angering the Laan and in no way dissuading them from inadvertently destroying the planet through their birthing ritual. Meanwhile Romana and Earth’s new President Sheridan Moorkurk are still in telepathic communication with the Laan and experiencing all of this creature’s pain with the Doctor in the middle trying to work out why these sentient alien paupuses have turned up here in the first place.

Which all sounds a bit messy but is fairly straightforward in the listening thanks to a parallel character arc for the President, a young women thrust into power thanks to a protest vote against the Conglomerate still attempting to square her relative inexperience as a person with her authority as a politician, the story turning on her decision-making abilities and independent thought. While the Doctor is still at the centre of the action, it’s Sheridan’s struggle which gives the story its philosophical teeth, aided extraordinarily by Hayley Atwell’s capacity (yes, Hayley Atwell) to communicate all of these contradictions.

Otherwise my casting comments about the previous episode still stand though there’s some added mystery as to who Cuthbert is, if he is as he seems. The usual suspects have skimmed through the book and volume of my brain (It’s Davros! It’s the Master!) but since this is all supposed to be “in period” its more likely to be something which isn’t so much about personality as status. Interestingly in his post-match interview, David Warner (who really is stonking in the role) says that he only discovered it was recurring at the recording of this one which makes it all the more fascinating. Oh Mr Briggs what are you up to?

When writing about the first half I suggested is was fatally difficult to review because it was only the first half. The second half doesn’t have that problem. It’s charming. It’s still as I said then “pretty generic Doctor Who which fills an hour with some excellent performances, atmospheric sound design and some intrigue” but as anyone who’s watched the television series sometimes will know, that can be devilishly difficult to achieve however many episodes there are. Plus there’s a really ballsy moment when one of his characters recalls the line everyone is thinking at an important moment of the story in a staggering piece of self-awareness.  Only franchises with this history are capable of that.

Doctor Who: War Against the Laan by Nicholas Briggs is out now from Big Finish.  Review copy supplied.

WHO 50: 1979: City of Death.

TV The last time I went abroad was to Paris, just over ten years ago.

Now, I could sit here and type a list of reasons why I wanted to go, but in reality it’s probably for the same reason plenty of Doctor Who fans visit Paris.

City of Death.

Tom and Lalla falling in love off screen as they rush around Paris on screen fighting the might Scaroth. It was my favourite story. Still is.

So when I became a fan again, I knew there was one place I wanted to go in the world that I could broadly speaking afford and I designed my trip to pretty much go everywhere the TARDIS team do, to see the Mona Lisa, travel on the metro, a café, though not it has to be said, a dungeon in a château though Le Defence was roughly the same thing.

The younger version of me has already written about the trip on this blog and the original posts are still here.

Above all I wanted to visit the Eiffel Tower and stand in the same place as Tom and Lalla and look out across Paris.

As I explain in the original post, the process of visiting the tower was everything I expected, with the queues, the tourists and the tourists kissing in the queues.

What I hadn’t expected was my rare moment of spontaneity. The night before I’d actually watched City of Death and transcribed the Eiffel Tower scene so I could include it on a surprise postcard home having not told friends I was going.

Standing in that spot, looking out the same view they had, I decided that there was only one thing I had to do. So I fished the transcribed scene from my pocket, opened it out, and began to read.

Out loud.

THE DOCTOR and his companion ROMANA stand on the top of the Eifel Tower in Paris looking down at view below.

Doctor : Nice isn't it?
Romana : Yes, marvellous.
Doctor : Marvellous, absolutely.
Romana : Absolutely marvellous.
Doctor : Well I think it's marvellous.
Romana : So do I. Though it's not quite as you described it.
Doctor : Really? How did I describe it?
Romana : You said it was nice!
Doctor : It's the only place in the world where one can relax entirely.
Romana : Mmm! That bouquet!
Doctor : What Paris has... It has an ethos. It has a life. A.....
Romana : A bouquet?
Doctor : A spirit all of its own. Like a white wine, it has...
Romana : A bouquet?
Doctor : It has a bouquet. Yes. Like a good wine. You'd have to choose one of vintage years of course.
Romana : What year is this?
Doctor : Ah well, yes. It's 1979 actually. More of a table wine shall we say? Hah! The randomiser’s a useful device but it lacks true discrimination. Should we sip it and see?
Romana : Ooh! I'd be delighted. Shall we take the lift or fly?
Doctor : Lets not be ostentatious.
Romana : Alright. Lets fly then.
Doctor : That would look silly. We'll take the lift. Come on.

Cut to ...

My Tom Baker impression was only serviceable; Jon Culshaw with a cold. My Lalla Ward was non-existent. I didn't read it that loudly, mostly due to embarrassment.

 Now, I think I would have gone right at it, a full on, scarf wearing performance.

But I was meek, then, but still loud enough that when I’d finished, an American bloke turned to me, later he tells me his name is Bob, and asked me what I'd been doing.

“Were you sermonizing?” Bob asked.
“No.” I said.
“What was that?”
“Erm … did you ever see Doctor Who?”

Now remember, this was 2002, three whole years before the show returned to television and ten years before it arguably broke into the US in any kind of meaningful way. But I remember Bob knowing what Doctor Who was, unless he was just humouring me

I ended up telling him the whole story. About Tom and Lalla. About how it was filmed just where he was standing. He asked for a photo. I got one to.

Then he tottered off, his wife close behind, leaving me to take in, yes, the bouquet, and realising that over the next three days I would be sampling the rest too.

Later in the cafe (tick) I enjoyed a coffee and chocolate waffle and wrote some postcards, dabbing it in my messy chocolate drips on the table in an attempt to send some taste of Paris home.  There was a post office on the tower and I posted them there. A Euro for the two. In all I probably spent about two and a half hours up there, but it seemed like years.

The experience was not unlike Christmas Afternoon.  All of that build up and it's over in minutes.

As I queued for the lift down, I heared a familiar voice behind me.

‘Oooh look Mary – it’s Doctor Who….’

WHO 50: 1978: The Ribos Operation.

TV In the early 90s, BBC Video released what would come to be known as the “Years” videos. Initially they were an opportunity to release orphan surviving episodes with some kind of linking material, (“Daleks: The Early Years” etc) but later plastic boxes with things in featured surviving Doctors talking about their time on the show, Pertwee, Colin Baker and most expressively Tom Baker (Sylv and Pete entirely shut out of the process for reasons unknown) (I mean I know Slyv had only been off air for a few years, not enough time to really appraise his contribution, but Pete?).

Unlike the other releases in which the titular Time Lord chose their favourite episodes and extra-curricular clips, The Tom Baker Years majestically spread itself across two video tapes and featured the actor sat in comfy chair in front of a television in a large, stately room with a remote control watching clips from all of his stories, specially selected by John Nathan Turner, the idea being that he’d be able to ambitiously offer anecdotes and memories of them all, over a decade before the advent of the dvd commentary would force him to do it all over again.

As a fare weather fan in that period, this was really my first introduction to the off-screen personality of Tom in all its miscellaneous glory and as it turned out in that period he could seemingly barely remember half the stories, including the titles. Many fans spoke in unison with the small caption which appears correcting his titling of The Seeds of Doom as “The Invasion of the Krynoids or The Krynoid Invasion” (surely the first production subtitle extra in Who history).

From that moment on I could rarely say Lalla Ward without stressing the consonants in her surname (“I got to know her quite well…” he says coyly after watching a montage sequence about their marriage), or talk about Tom without affecting the voice and his guttural approach to umming and aaahing and until the dvd release, my only impression of most of the stories was the clip and Tom’s ensuing giggle (The Power of Kroll in particular which was served by the climactic struggle between the Doctor and rubbery Kroll on the oil rig) ("Haha ... well ...").

So often have I watched The Tom Baker Years, that sometimes it’s now quite strange when seeing the whole episode that Tom doesn’t pop up in his chair at the end of the relevant scene with his anecdote before turning away and suggesting, “let’s watch another…” If only the dvds had included a branching option. The reveal of Romana in The Ribos Operation is never quite the same without a cutaway to Tom smirk and the following explanation:

“Also, you may have noticed I had a scabby lip. That was because a few days before we shot that I’d been in a pub, gosh, and a chap, an actor there had a dog called George that he’d brought. George had been in care at the Battersea Dogs Home, a sort of Barnardos for dogs, and George was a very jumpy little terrier, and had been short of affection all his life until he met this actor, and aaah, and one of the tricks people did, the actor did was to make a sort of clicking noise like so (at which point Tom makes a popping noise with his finger in his mouth using his cheek) and George used to go absolutely crackers, I think he must have associated it with some sort of violence in his childhood, aaaaaaahmmmm, this tiny little terrier, and I had gone to buy him a sausage because I’m a sap for deprived dogs, and errr trying to attract his attention I went to do that and he flew across from this actors knee and errr I thought he’d bitten my lip off. Apparently I remained amazingly calm, I tried to calculate what would have happened if he had bitten my lip off, there was blood everywhere and everyone was screaming and shouting and the more they screamed and shouted, the more I enjoyed being the centre of attention even though I was bleeding to death and I thought to myself, “Gosh, if he’s bitten my lip off, I’ll have to play smiling parts for the rest of my career.” Fortunately as you saw he hadn’t bitten my lip off, they patched it up and hid it so that I could play those scenes…”

Let’s watch another …

WHO 50: 1977: The Invisible Enemy.

TV Everyone who’s a Doctor Who fan like to talk about their first memory of the series.

With the volume of rereleases and spin-off media this becomes increasingly harder as we find our original recollections of what we saw being submerged with new experiences.

But it’s the dvds which have allowed me to identify which story my first memory is from.

For years and years, I had a clear image of Leela edging along a corridor with a knife and K9.

Years before watching the Davison era religiously thanks to its tea time weeknight slot, this rattled around my mind, and it explains much about me, probably, that unlike other kids who might vividly remember Tom’s benevolent tooth and curls, I had a savage in a leather bikini and a robot dog.

My other toddling tv memory was of ITV's glam rock Banana Splits knock off Animal Kwackers.

Those day-glo misshapen furry costumes used to give me nightmares.

As I began watching Doctor Who again in the early noughties, I was eager to finally discover which story my memory was from.

I’m still not sure. Leela and K9 spent a lot of time in corridors.

But, there is a moment in The Invisible Enemy which is close enough. There’s a corridor, there’s Leela, there’s K9 and the walls have a similar hue.

So my first memory of Doctor Who is from The Invisible Enemy, my three year old mind ignoring, not just Tom, but the psychedelic Fantastic Voyage people shrinking imagery elsewhere.

That probably explains a lot about me too.

Nicholas Briggs’s The Sands of Life.

Audio  After the initial excitement of Tom and Mary reunited (or not quite as was the case thanks to the intricate farce of The Auntie Matter), we’re now straight into the business of sorting out what a Fourth Doctor and Romana story is really like outside of The Key To Time season. The answer if Nicholas Briggs’s The Sands of Life is a model, is some pretty generic Doctor Who which fills an hour with some excellent performances, atmospheric sound design and some intrigue, which is fatally difficult to review in this context because despite its unusual three episode structure (Big Finish tend to offer two per disc), this is only the first half of the story, and the slightly “generic” element could just be a classic bait and switch, the second disc turning the entire story on its head.

In the near future, the Doctor and Romana tumble to Earth just as masses of alien beasts capable of manipulating the time stream are apparently returning to their breeding ground in the Sahara Desert, during which endeavour they wipe out a space platform owned by a conglomerate called The Conglomerate, whose CEO, Cuthbert isn’t too pleased about it. All the while Romana finds herself communicating with the beasts, which is of particular interest to Earth forces when the time team are inevitably captured and then Cuthbert who pulls some strings to force the Doctor’s co-operation in his investigation of this unusual species. Before long Romana’s lost in the desert and the Doctor’s rushing to save her.

There’s not one element of that which doesn’t thrum to the sound of some other Who adventure and throughout the story beats remixed from elsewhere are deafening pitched in, from the Doctor obfuscating in the face of authority to intergalactic xenomorphism to the tension between big business and the government. This is more comfort Who and Briggs’s script is incredibly witty throughout, especially in those moments self-reflexively relating backwards to Tom’s own wild pronouncements about the kinds of things he’d like to see in Doctor Who related to badgers and companions shaped like parrots.

It’s the usual tension in these Fourth Doctor adventures about whether they’re supposed to be providing a waxwork recreation of Saturday night television drama in the 70s or something which throws the essentials into a contemporary mix. That’s marked here by Briggs’s own pastiche of a Dudley Simpson music backing what are entirely cinematic scenes, suggesting Planet of the Dead scored in the style of Planet of Evil. In the first series, that resolved itself into producing something which sounded like their source material but with stories which simply couldn’t or wouldn’t be produced then because of interesting narrative structures or changes in socio-political concerns. This is looser, purposefully less focused.

Yet it’s always compelling because of the cast. In the background to the main story is that of a new elected President of Earth who’s also hearing voices, played by Hayley Atwell. Yes, that’s Captain America’s Hayley Atwell, who despite her fame elsewhere remains a Big Finish regular (this is her fifth story) (I think) and is amazing value in a tiny role which must surely grow in importance in the bottom three so we’ll talk more about it then. She’s joined by the ever reliable David Warner, as the blandly evil Cuthbert, a clear analogue to certain Earth-1218 individuals whose business ownership means he’s arguably one of the most powerful men on the planet, certainly more powerful the elected representatives of the people.

All of which ignores the reunion of John Leeson as K9 with this TARDIS team. He’s been no stranger to the franchise obviously, but this is (again, I think) his first appearance in a regular format Who adventure outside of cameos, spin-offs, one off stories, remakes like Shada and audiobooks like Shada and it’s like he’s never left, picking up his chemistry with both Tom and Mary and proving that his voice always transcended the limitations of the tin dog, however cute he was. With due respect to David Brierley, K9 was never quite the same that season. What’s also remarkable is that there’s no showboating, no great entrance. At a time of crisis he’s simply, there, in the TARDIS chatting to Romana. Good dog.

Doctor Who: The Sands of Life by Nicholas Briggs is out now from Big Finish.  Review copy supplied.

WHO 50: 1976:The Hand of Fear.

TV  Sarah Jane’s final scene in The Hand of Fear.  The Daleks and TARDIS might be the surface reasons for the franchise’s ongoing success, but if there’s one scene which best expresses the tone of Doctor Who, it’s Sarah Jane’s final scene in The Hand of Fear.

The convenient misunderstanding, the potted plant, the stuffed owl, the freeze frame.  Almost every Who writer since then has challenged themselves to recapture the indefinable spirit of that scene for better or worse and once you notice it, you’ll see it in dozens and dozens of other stories.

It’s there in the mismatched friendship between the Tenth Doctor and Donna.  The Eighth Doctor and his shoes in the park.  The squareness gun.  The whole of The Snowmen feels exactly like that if you watch closely enough.

That thing, you know, that indefinable thing.  The thing which makes us happy and sad both at the same time, silliness and seriousness wrapped tightly and loosely together with a scarf.  This thing:

Inside the console room ...

SARAH: I'll never be warm again. Never, ever, ever.
DOCTOR: No, we're well out of that. Goodbye, Kastria.

The Tardis de-materialises.

SARAH: Do you think that Eldrad, well, do you think that he really is dead?
DOCTOR: Oh, I doubt it. Very difficult to kill.
SARAH: Well, I quite liked her, but I couldn't stand him.

The Tardis tilts.

DOCTOR: Whoa, easy, old girl, easy. These temperatures must have affected the thermo-couplings.
SARAH: Yes, I know how she feels. I think Kastria must be the coldest planet in the galaxy.
DOCTOR: Oh, rubbish. I've been to much colder places.
SARAH: Oh, big deal. It's all right for you. I'm human. We're not so thick-skinned.

The Doctor gets under the console.

DOCTOR: Where's that astro-rectifier? What did you say?
SARAH: Thick-skinned.
DOCTOR: Oh, good, good.
SARAH: Here.
DOCTOR: Multi-quantiscope.
SARAH: You know, I might as well be talking to the moon. You don't even listen to me.
DOCTOR: Mergin nut.
SARAH: What?
DOCTOR: No, no, forget the mergin nut. I'll have the ganymede driver.
SARAH: There.
DOCTOR: Thank you.
SARAH: Oh, I must be mad. I'm sick of being cold and wet, and hypnotised left right and centre. I'm sick of being shot at, savaged by bug-eyed monsters, never knowing if I'm coming or going or been.
DOCTOR: Zeus plug.
SARAH: Oh, I want a bath. I want my hair washed. I just want to feel human again.
DOCTOR: Forget the zeus plug. I'll have the sonic screwdriver.
SARAH: Oh, and boy am I sick of that sonic screwdriver! I'm going to pack my goodies and I'm going home. I said, I'm going to pack my goodies and I am going home! Right! Excuse me!

Sarah storms out of the console room.

DOCTOR: What was that you? I don't know why she goes on like this. There's really nothing the matter at all.

The Doctor gets a mental wave.

DOCTOR: The call. The call from Gallifrey. Gallifrey. After all this time, Gallifrey. I can't take Sarah to Gallifrey. Must get her back home. Must reset the coordinates. South Croydon.

Sarah enters carrying a bag and a pile of stuff including a plant in a pot, a stuffed toy owl and a tennis racquet.

SARAH: Ahem!
DOCTOR: You're a good girl, Sarah.
SARAH: Oh, look, it's too late apologising now. Everything's packed. I've got to go.
DOCTOR: What? How did you know?
SARAH: What?
DOCTOR: I've had the call from Gallifrey.
SARAH: So?
DOCTOR: So I can't take you with me. You've got to go.
SARAH: Oh, come on. I can't miss Gallifrey. Look, I was only joking. I didn't mean it. Hey. Hey, you're not going to regenerate again, are you?
DOCTOR: Not this time. I don't know what's going to happen.
SARAH: You're playing one of your jokes on me, just trying to make me stay.
DOCTOR: No. I've received the call, and as a Time Lord I must obey.
SARAH: Alone?
DOCTOR: Yes.

The Tardis materialises.

SARAH: And I'll give your love to Harry and the Brigadier. Oh, and I can tell Professor Watson that you're all right.
DOCTOR: We've landed, Sarah.
SARAH: What?
DOCTOR: We've landed.
SARAH: Where?
DOCTOR: South Croydon. Hillview Road, to be exact.
SARAH: That's my home. Well, I'll be off then. Here.

She gives him his coat back.

DOCTOR: Thanks.
SARAH: Don't forget me.
DOCTOR: Oh, Sarah. Don't you forget me.
SARAH: Bye, Doctor. You know, travel does broaden the mind.
DOCTOR: Yes. Till we meet again, Sarah.

Sarah leaves.

In Stokefield Close, the Tardis dematerialises. Sarah looks around.

SARAH: This isn't Hillview Road. I bet it isn't even South Croydon. Oh. He blew it.

She speaks to a dog who is sunbathing on the pavement.

SARAH: Hey, hey. You. He blew it.

The dog runs off. Sarah walks away whistling 'Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow'.

Freeze frame.

WHO 50: 1975: Terror of the Zygons.

TV  I've never seen Terror of the Zygons.

For some readers, that is like admitting I've never seen Star Wars.

But the truth is, I've always liked having new old Who.

I like that there's still a Tom Baker story I haven't seen beyond clips, random shots of Tom Baker in a kilt, the Brigadier in a sporran and The-Loch-Ness-Monster.

Having remained relatively spoiler free, I don't actually know what the Zygon's original plan to conquer the planet Earth was or what The-Loch-Ness-Monster has to do with it.

One of the virtues of classic Who's generally self contained format is that there's no great need to have seen everything.

Regeneration stories perhaps.

When a companion leaves.

In general though, there's no great loss in not having seen a story, not in the same way as other series television in which a viewer might miss some great narrative revelation or twist.

Truth is, I've never felt the rush to see how Harry was written out.

That said, it is the only televisually available story that I have ignored.  I'd wait for the dvd.  Then it wasn't released for a decade.

There are plenty of stories only available on audio which I've also ignored until now.  I have no idea what The Savages is about other then there are some savages, probably.

When I explained this to a friend, they sounded quite envious as they noted having seen everything, the only way they can enjoy some new old Who is if a missing episode is found.

By the end of this year, I'll be the same position.

By then (hopefully) I'll have finished working my way through all of Doctor Who in chronological order for the first time.

Including Terror of the Zygons.

I hope it's good.

Jonathan Morris’s The Auntie Matter.

Audio Well, this is good fun. As the obituary come interview that fills the final track on the cd suggests (and try listening to it all of the way through without having a reason to rub your eyes, especially when Tom …), there’s no getting away from the slight air melancholy that pervades our listening of this second series of Fourth Doctor stories reuniting the character with the first Romana and sometimes K9 for the first time since their single year together in the seventies because with the loss of Mary Tamm it can be the only such reunion, at least in this format.

But what Jonathan Morris’s The Auntie Matter proves is that if the work is good, and this is oh so very good, it can stand, just like the posthumous final season of The Sarah Janes Adventures, as a testament to the personalities involved and become something to cherish. It goes without saying that Tamm is good, like Louise Jameson in the previous series finding again the younger, more naïve version of her character after playing an older, wiser iteration in the Gallifrey spin-off. But there are moments when you simply forget that this wasn’t recorded in the seventies.

Which is odd, because there are few things about this that really bespeak that period in the show’s history. Back then, the production team, Graham Williams at the helm, Anthony Read script editing, simply didn't seem interested in producing a 20s set Wodehousian run around about a maiden aunt in a country pile with a deadly secret, a thinly veiled homage to Jeeves and Wooster and the kind of farcical humour that wouldn’t really become a part of the show until the noughties. None of which is a criticism, because in this context, with these characters, it just works. A lot.

Much of that has to do with Jonathan Morris’s clever script which intricately undercuts the listener’s expectations so that whenever we think we have the measure of the action, we’re quickly sent off on a tangent along with the characters. So whilst it opens with what seems like an eye-rollingly clichéd Doctor Who trope, which despite being early in the play is shockingly horrific enough that it wouldn’t be fair to spoil here, Morris is quick to narratively indicate that it’s actually beside the point. The real point is to place this Romana in situations unaccustomed and have a jolly good time.

Which both Tom and Mary clearly are. By time of recording both had become pretty regular audio fixtures and so there is a slight shock of the new, but even on television, I don’t remember them having quite this much chemistry. In Tom’s performance then, it was always possible to detect a certain awe (because let’s face it, right through her life Mary Tamm was awesome). Now they bicker as equals and after hearing Night of the Stormcrow yesterday, it’s interesting to hear the subtle differences in Tom’s performance between companions and actresses.

Not that Romana’s his only companion here. Circumstances force the Doctor ask the assistance of his housemaid, Mabel, a much younger girl from Mrs Wibbsey (played with good humour by Robin Hood’s Lucy Griffiths) (or is that True Blood’s Lucy Griffiths now?) because he needs someone to ask questions. Yes, amid everything Morris even takes time to give this Doctor some self-awareness of what he really requires from a companion, someone who will treat him with a certain amount of awe (perhaps a sly dig at Baker’s own attitude to such things in the 70s).

As ever with these things, Big Finish has attracted a really strong cast. Julia McKenzie gives the eponymous matriarch the full Crowdon, a magnificently huge performance which in any other context would be ludicrous but seems like fair game against Tom’s eccentric might. She’s joined by RSC and televisual character actor Robert Portal, hilarious as Reggie, her featherbrained nephew and Alan Cox as the butler, whose familiar voice I’ve just reminded myself seemed so familiar because I last heard him on this Shakespeare compilation.

As I sat listening to the second episode in Starbucks on Bold Street earlier supping a Gingerbread Latte (still loads of the stuff left apparently) hooting away, I don’t think I’ve been happier, this week at least, especially after a brief existential crisis this morning (don’t ask) (no, really, don’t). Yesterday, I talked about comfort Who, and this is another example, Morris once again delivering a little marvel designed, amongst other things to showcase a voice which will be much missed. If the rest of the new series is this funny and this clever, I’ll be very, very pleased.

Doctor Who: The Auntie Matter from Big Finish is out now.  Review copy supplied.

Marc Platt’s Night of the Stormcrow.

Audio One of the curiously underdeveloped sub-genres in Doctor Who is in the area of interstellar xenobiology. Whereas the Starship Enterprise couldn’t warp through a parsec without bumping into a pregnant object shaped like a brazil nut, Who has tended to shy away from such extraordinary evolution, preferring instead to concentrate on humanoid human-sized varieties of alien, presumably because they were easier to plausibly execute with some fibre glass and bubble wrap. Even in recent years, with CGI capable of creating all kinds of wonders, the television version has only really had that space whale and what’s now forever being called the “Cash Cow” in Torchwood’s Meat because no one in the episode bothered to call it anything else.

As ever spin-off media with its voracious appetite for stories has tended to be more flexible, and Marc Platt’s Night of the Stormcrow is a prime-cut example, the curious creature of the title, as the cover illustrates, a massive avian treating the earth-like a feeding table in its celestial back garden, an observatory full of scientists its fat filled treat. Aided by Vashta Nerada-like “pilot fish” (in The Christmas Invasion sense), from above it devours people and parts of the landscape in a way which even modern CGI would seem incapable of rendering convincingly and in the period when the Fourth Doctor and Leela were in the TARDIS would probably have amounted to FX man Ian Scoones nervously wrangling some ravens against a blue screen.

But like the space whale and cash cow, this isn’t just about the Doctor trying to persuade a genetic marvel to fight against its natural instincts; as soon as he and the savage arrive, he’s dealing with its potential exploitation by humans, on this occasion with reputations and research grants on the line. The unforgettably named Professor Gesima Cazalet has tracking the bird for over a decade and aided by a team headed by erasable American Peggy, desperate to take credit for her “discovery”. This parochial reaction to the remarkable is the kind of thing which Who always does very well, and the highlights are undoubtedly when the Time Lord and the warrior of the Savateem are refereeing their clashes.

As the accompanying interviews indicate, part of that has to do with contrasting acting experiences. As Gesima, Ann Bell brings her very British heritage across the BBC and stage, even starring with Louise Jameson in Tenko. Chase Masterson, who as she says enjoys playing against type as Peggy is best known as she also charmingly reminds us as Leeta the Dabo Girl in Deep Space Nine (and one of my teenage crushes I’m not embarrassed to say) (honestly). Dropped into that maelstrom are Tom and Louise, both on form, the former pointedly given a grumpier Doctor to play than usual but who does at least convince Leela to hilariously utilise her knife for something other than killing. That’s all I’ll say.

But for all its chaotic casting juxtapositions, this is comfort Who, through and through. It’s an isolated base under siege (cf, Horror of Fang Rock for a start), massive, earth shattering tragedies occurring even before they’ve arrived (cf, The Girl Who Waited, I suppose) and suspicion towards these two strangers who’ve wandered in seemingly from nowhere (cf, well, everything). Yet Platt’s script is much stronger than usual, even allowing time for Leela to consider her unique place in the Whoniverse, telling us more about the character in a few sentences than the whole season and a half that she was on television, not that as she promises to keep hunting tirelessly for a home, it explains why she unexpectedly finds it with a Gallifreyan guard.

Doctor Who: Night of the Stormcrow by Marc Platt is available to Big Finish customers who buy a 6 or 12-release subscription to the Doctor Who Monthly Range and will be available to buy from December 2013.  Review Copy Supplied.

Alan Barnes’s The Oseidon Adventure

Audio In this month’s Doctor Who Magazine, Jonathan Morris utilises the structure of Michael Apted’s Up series to snapshot the franchise at various points in its history and describes how at 14up!, in 1977, the show had increased its reliance on its prime asset, Tom Baker, because Saturday night on BBC One in that year wasn’t about the programmes but the personalities, “Basil. Tom. Brucie. Ronnie. The other Ronnie.” One of the many successes of this Big Finish series has been its ability to identify the extent to which Tom's magnetism dominated his stories and treat it a gift rather than try to produce stories that work in spite of him.

Alan Barnes’s The Oseidon Adventure is at the apotheosis of that approach, a story in which one of the pillars of Tom’s performance, his boggle eyed, breathless sarcasm, bulldozes out and becomes the driving force of a plot that challenges the listener to take a step back and wonder if they can really believe anything they’re hearing. If by the end of the first episode you’re not, like me, doing your best impression of Gwen Cooper in Torchwood’s Miracle Day, throwing your hands in the air and saying “So... why the hell... you know... blerp... Bollocks.” you’ve missed the point and you’re clearly not enjoying it as much as I did.

At the close of the previous adventure we were awaiting the arrival of some mystery alien ally of the Master which the cover of this adventure reveals to be the Kraals, the staticly stony faced antagonists from Terry Nation’s The Android Invasion which should give some clue as to the direction of the story. As the inlay synopsis explains “Chief Scientist Tyngworg has not just one plan, but a back-up plan, and a back-up back-up plan worked out...” Except what’s interesting about the play is what’s not in that synopsis and the parts of that synopsis which are just flat out wrong, and gloriously so.

In the accompanying interviews, Louise Jamson admits to reading parts of the script several times before she fully understood what was going on, not helped by having to record everything out of sequence. I can understand her perplexity such is the complexity of Barnes’s script which for much of its run time takes great pleasure in bewildering the listener, utilising its non-visual medium to trick us as to what’s happening to whom and how. It would be tempting to label The Oseidon Adventure as farce were it not for the element of bursting expectation inherent in that genre. The writer doesn’t let his audience off the hook that easily.

Which isn’t to say the play’s entirely a romp. As with Trail of the White Worm, Barnes is careful to set his work in a fully realised, if not entirely realistic 1970s, creating a certain distance from its television counterparts by including very specific pop culture references and making his antagonist as much as anything else the right wing Daily Mail reading sensibilities most right or rather left thinking people despise, typified by Michael Cochrane’s Colonel Spindleton, with the plastic recreation of Devesham from the original adventure symbolic of the synthetic Britishness which represents the Conservative ideal.

It almost goes without saying Tom and Louise are as excellent as ever both having tremendous fun chasing after the story as it motors away from them and as expected Geoffrey Beavers enjoys a much more expanded role as the Master, his guttural growl a perfect extrapolation of his on-screen horrific make-up. But the undoubted comic triumph are Dan Starkey and John Banks as the Kraals, which as the cd extras reveal realised early on that the best approach is to essentially to have Sontarans doing Zippy impression. The result is slightly more nuanced than that, and even if this isn’t some one hit monster with a new-found series potential, they’re certainly funny enough to carry this hour.

Doctor Who: The Oseidon Adventure by Alan Barnes is out now from Big Finish.

The Sunday Seven. Alan Barnes. Writer.

As you'll see from the questions and answers, Alan Barnes wrote Storm Warning, the audio Doctor Who story which made me a proper fan again early in the previous decade and the first adventure for my favourite companion Charley Pollard. He's currently one of the writers on the new series of Fourth Doctor Adventures for Big Finish, the final stories for which have been released in this past couple of months.

How did you become a writer?

I graduated in 1991, in the middle of a grim recession. Rather than write out ten job applications a day, which is what the feller running the Job Club insisted I had to do, I spent as much time as I could writing stuff on spec – reviews, features, comic strips, radio series, anything – for as many markets as I could think of – not just the obvious culty, sci-fi stuff, but, y’know, puzzle magazines, corporate magazines, anything. Got absolutely nowhere. Two and a half horrible years later, I was at the monthly fan gathering in the Fitzroy Tavern when the conversation, for some reason, turned to the 1960s TV Century 21 Dalek strips. Gary Russell, who was editing Doctor Who Magazine at the time, said, fairly casually, that he’d always wanted to see a one-page Cybermen strip in a similar vein. I made my excuses, went home, typed up a proposal and a sample script, put it in the post the next morning… and my fate was sealed!

If there’s a lesson in that, it’s do as much practice as you can, waiting for the moment the opportunity presents itself… and pounce on it the second it does. But it was the two and half years’ seemingly pointless practice that meant the proposal was halfway decent.

What was your inspiration for Trail of the White Worm?

Bram Stoker by way of Ken Russell, obviously! But there was a lot about the 1970s in there, too – I’d been reading a book called When the Lights Went Out, a history of the time, and there was a lot in there about the strange right-wing ex-military types who were quite serious about assembling private armies and mounting a coup against the Labour government, so that was where Colonel Spindleton came from. John and Julie, the boy in love with the girl who’s in love with punk, came from the song Jilted John, aka ‘Gordon is a Moron’.

What was the trickiest element to achieve?

It had to lead in directly to another two-parter, so I was juggling two stories that needed to be individually distinct and rewarding, but nonetheless intimately connected. You’ll have to listen to The Oseidon Adventure to find out if I succeeded! But yeah, that was the trickiest bit.

Of everything you've done what have you been most pleased with?

Of the Doctor Who audios, probably The Girl Who Never Was – it was the first script I wrote after becoming script editor for the range, so not only did I have to split up the Eighth Doctor and Charley permanently, it had to be an exemplary script if I wasn’t going to end up telling my peers, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’. So I couldn’t afford to indulge any of my bad habits: it had to be bang on length, with snappy dialogue (no over-written speeches), plus constant intercutting between short, tight scenes. I don’t think I’ve ever put together anything quite so tightly plotted. Of everything I’ve done… probably ‘Sherlock Holmes On Screen’.

Apart from an unexpected and nostalgic trip to the old Doctor Who exhibition at Llangollen, the Big Finish audio Storm Warning was the story which made me a fan again. How did you go about find the voice of the Eighth Doctor given his short screen time in the TV movie?

The TV movie dialogue isn’t particularly distinct or expressive, but McGann’s delivery is, so it was about trying to find lines that seemed to fit that slightly ‘breathy’ delivery – then just crossing my fingers and hoping that it actually worked! And also, just to keep the whole thing moving at pace – the TV Movie didn’t really linger on anything, it’s all rush rush rush, bang bang bang, so I played the John Debney soundtrack on repeat while I was writing it, just to feel my way into that zone.

Who’s your favourite Doctor Who writer?

It changes week by week, but today: Robert Holmes. I’ve just been re-reading his Two Doctors novelisation for an upcoming Fact of Fiction (an archive feature in Doctor Who Magazine -- Ed.) and it’s brilliant – really wry and smart, with this mordant, borderline misanthropic undertone. Amazed that it isn’t more remarked upon – it’s up there with the Malcolm Hulkes, in my estimation. Tragic that it was the only one he ever did: oh, for his Talons of Weng-Chiang…!

What stops you from feeling listless?

I’ve got three children, I don’t have enough me-time to start feeling ennui!

Doctor Who: Trail of the White Worm and The Oseidon Adventure by Alan Barnes are out now from Big Finish.

Alan Barnes's Trail of the White Worm

Audio For  the first half of the final story of the series, writer Alan Barnes's Trail of the White Worm takes us right back into the Hinchcliffe end of the franchise with a Holmesain story that riffs on an old horror classic, features a megalomaniac Time Lord foe and is thick with the atmosphere of the late 70s, portrayed on audio via the culture clash between the exoticism of punk culture and the parochialism of Derbyshire’s Hardyesque bygumism. It’s as though the whole thing’s happening in Dominic Sandbrook’s dreams on a night when he’s fallen asleep after a reading Bram Stoker’s book, its supernatural elements still rattling about his brain.

The TARDIS drops the Doctor and Leela in the Peaks, where they find themselves embroiled in the search for a missing girl and the mystery of mucus deposits across the rocks of the Dark Peak Gap, created by what the locals calls a “you know what” but whose identity is rather given away from the title. Before long we’re straight into the classic structure of the time travellers becoming separated, with different bits of the back story being revealed to them and us, the Doctor’s deductive powers filling in the vital missing pieces, Barnes leaving just enough breadcrumbs that we might ourselves be able to guess if we’re listening carefully enough.

Apart from Bob Holmes, the other writer who most obviously comes to mind is Paul Magrs.  This is first of these plays which seems to tonally glance deliberately in the direction of the AudioGo range especially in the latter sections when the White Worm becomes the focus and the listener’s challenged to imagine the unimaginable. Certainly the characterisation’s as bonkers as Hornet’s Nest, featuring Colonel Splindleton an aristocratic big game hunter who has access to a massive arsenal of weapons and an aristocrat labelled Demesne Furze (which in reality’s a leafy new build in Headington, Oxford) (no really, it’s on Google’s street view).

As ever with this series, Big Finish’s attracted an A-list for audio cast. The Colonel’s  huge gestures and Vernian adventurism is perfectly suited to Michael Cochrane, veteran of The Archers and an eerily accurate Malcolm Muggeridge on Holy Flying Circus, the Monty Python bio.  He’s joined by Rachael Stirling, yes that’s Tipping the Velvet and Boy Meets Girl’s Rachael Stirling as Demesne, almost unrecognisable with her pitch perfect, according to Tom in the extras, impression of Ealing regular Joan Greenwood, rolling her rrrrs and sounding about twenty years older. Impeccable.

There’s Becci Gemmell from Land Girls too as Julie, a kind of quick witted I can’t believe she’s not Lucie Miller figure with aspirations for the bright lights of Carnaby Street but the clear draw here is the return of Geoffrey Beavers as the Master in a story set chronologically before his debut in the role in The Keeper of Traken. Without the cumbersome make-up to deal with, Beavers is able to bring his rich consonants to a role which he’s made his own across a number of the these audios, the perfect mirror image to the fourth Doctor, Anthony Ainley never quite was during their single adventure.

I hope you’ll forgive the fixation on casting but they are one the highlights and with at least six paragraphs to fill and not wanting to give away too much of the story, I’m left to free associate with my starry eyes. Perhaps the only advice I’d offer is saving the play for next month and listening along with the final couple of episodes from The Oseidon Adventure. Though it’s relatively self contained, it does still feel like half a story and will perhaps be most satisfying with the other half, which features some of the same characters and resolves much of what happens here. Apparently.

Doctor Who: Trail of the White Worm by Alan Barnes is out now.

Energy of the Daleks

Audio There was always something slightly cruel and bit unusual about the fact that Leela, the one warrior companion who would have been the perfect foe for the Daleks never actually appeared with them on television. Indeed, as Nicholas Briggs, voice of the pepperpots and writer of this story explains in the supplementary material, the Fourth Doctor only every had two exciting adventures with the Daleks and both of them focused on their creator Davros rather than providing a more typical romp. So in keeping with the rest of this series of audio adventures, he had in mind to redress the balance and produce the kind of story the contemporary production team were unwilling or at least unable to put before the camera.

Briggs’s script for Energy of the Daleks is also idiomatic of two other periods in the show's history. The story, about the search for an infinite, free power source at a time when natural resources are critical bespeaks the environmental concerns of the Letts/Dicks era, especially with its central friendship built at college between two idealistic geniuses one of whom, Damien Stephens, becomes darkly enamoured with commerce over the philanthropic potential, the other, Jack Coulson, leading occupy-style protests on the day of reckoning. But the setting of 2025 is very much nuWho with smartphones, the internet and secret headquarters in famous London landmarks. Coulson is even played by Rose’s Mark Benton (with Dan “Sontaran” Starkey in other roles).

Then there are the Daleks. Often keen to experiment, Briggs sometimes modulates the sound of his favourite enemy differently in these audios than television. Here we have the full on Briggs Daleks still capable of being terrifying in audio, especially when listening through headphones with the curtains drawn. As ever their underlying aim is utterly bonkers but the details are where the creepiness lies, the implications of the creation of the robomen, a comedy set piece in Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., utterly repulsive here.  As Briggs has rightly noted elsewhere, the Daleks are at their scariest when there’s a thought process, when they’re sly, when indeed they’re not simply Davros’s bodyguards and he puts all that well into practice.

This was the first of these new adventures to be recorded but already Tom and Louise are in their element, the old chemistry re-ignited after twenty-odd years, perhaps helped slightly by this not being their first attempt at recreating the characters. Benton is also a perfect straight man for Tom, filling the Duggan role as the dopey human usefully blundering into situations, drafted into bravery because the alternative is nastier than death. The rest of the cast is also pretty impressive. Along with Starkey, there’s Caroline Keiff (who was in the original stage cast of Wicked) and Alex Lowe (a regular in Ken Branagh's ensemble and “Barry from Watford” on various radio shows) as potential victims (to say much more would be to say too much).

They can all sense that at its core this is an old-fashioned runaround, with the Doctor chasing energy signatures between rooms and Leela attempting to take down robomen with Janus thorns. After a relatively sober couple of adventures, it’s nice to hear the series returning to first principles and even if there’s a familiarity to some of the situations, Briggs isn’t adverse to affectionately offering a critical nudge about some of nuWho’s apparatus, not least the preponderant utilisation of the sonic screwdriver. Not that it isn't just possible Briggs is noting how much of old Who was narratively extended because the even the sonic couldn’t get through such and such a door.

Doctor Who: Energy of the Daleks is out now from Big Finish. Review copy supplied.