21
In Which We Watch the Doctor’s Alternate Adventures and Wind Up Removing All Our Clothing
Doctor Who audio adventures have been around, at least sporadically, since 1976 shoehorned Tom Baker and Sarah Jane into Doctor Who and the Pescatons, two episodes slipped onto a single long-playing vinyl disc, and one of those wonderfully nostalgia-soaked artifacts that still makes your heart pound when you spot one on e-Bay.
A decade later, in 1985, BBC Radio helped alleviate the pain of the show’s temporary absence from the screens with the Sixth Doctor adventure Slipback; while the 1990s saw the Third Doctor emerge from retirement to star in two further BBC radio plays, The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N Space.
So far, so . . . okay. As fans and collectors, we had long since grown accustomed to listening to lost adventures in audio only, allowing our minds to paint the most elaborate imagery around the words that had crossed the decades thus.
But Doctor Who remained a visual experience for all that, and the fact that the visuals no longer existed was an inconvenience that we just had to deal with. The idea of adventures for which the visuals had never existed wasn’t so much novel as it was ridiculous. Even the most familiar voice is just a voice, and the Doctor was always much more than that.
Wherefore the facial expressions and admonishing glances? Wherefore the costumes and outfitting? Wherefore the aliens? Devoid of visuals, even an Ice Warrior is just a chronic asthma sufferer, and a Dalek is reduced to Nam vet Ned in South Park, the one who speaks with an electro-larynx.
That was then. Since 1999, however, the entire field has been revolutionized to the point where the show’s 2005 television return was, in some eyes, having to compete with a series of adventures that had only ever existed as an audio experience, courtesy of the pioneering fan-based company called Big Finish.
The Biggest Finish
No less than sixty-nine monthly adventures had made their way out to Big Finish’s subscribers by the time the Ninth Doctor told Rose to “run!” for the first time, and for everyone who’d taken the journey so far, the TV had a lot to live up to.
Big Finish had its roots in a company called Audio Visuals, which spent the late 1980s entertaining a small coterie of diehard fans with a series of fairly amateurish but nonetheless worthy audio adventures featuring a whole new Doctor in what amounted to a whole new universe of adventure.
Cruelly, one acknowledges that even the best of Audio Visuals’ output was scarcely comparable to even the worst of what the BBC was simultaneously churning out in the names of the Sixth and early Seventh Doctor, but that was not the point. It was fun at a time when the TV show was growing increasingly, and self-consciously, crass; and for the program’s makers, it was experience, an object lesson in many of the arts that a successful audio range must master. As the players proved when they went onto the BBV video company for a string of not-quite-the-Doctor adventures in the 1990s, and/or Big Finish.
Big Finish first approached the BBC about inaugurating a range of Doctor Who audio plays in 1996. They were turned down, presumably because hopes were still high for the TV movie, and turned instead to the worlds of Professor Bernice Summerfield, an archaeologist who was first sighted in author Paul Cornell’s novel Love and War, and whose adventures throughout Big Finish’s first few Doctor-less years might more accurately be described as precursors to the later TV series’ “Doctor-Lite” adventures. For there is no shortage of series regulars in her tales, as the Sixth Doctor, the Brigadier, Ace, Sarah Jane, Polly, and Captain Yates all file through.
The series was successful, too; so much so that two years later, the BBC contacted Big Finish to ask if they were still interested in producing new Doctor Who adventures. The Sirens of Time, bringing together the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors in one ninety-minute adventure, followed in July 1999, and by early 2000, Big Finish was committed to producing one all-new audio drama every month. At least one, as a wealth of subsidiary series also presented itself, delving into every facet of the Whoniverse, and further afield too.
Since that time, virtually every key actor and actress involved with the original series seems to have joined the team, with the final holdout, Fourth Doctor Tom Baker, finally coming onboard in 2011 for a collection of stories based around “lost” (as in proposed, but unmade) adventures from his own era.
Every alien, too, seems to have returned, with the arrival of the Daleks in April 2000 (The Genocide Machine) opening floodgates that embrace not only familiar TV baddies, but also creatures created for past novels, and a few designed specifically for Big Finish.
A new coterie of companions has been born. Gently updating the First Doctor’s Barbara, Evelyne Smythe is a middle-aged history teacher whom the Sixth Doctor ropes into a planned journey back to the reign of England’s sixteenth century Queen Mary (The Marion Conspiracy, 2000), and who remains by his side so that she might continue to study history firsthand.
Charlotte “Charley” Pollard is a would-be aviation pioneer whom the Eighth Doctor meets stowing away aboard the airship R101, and whom he rescues from that craft’s (real-life) fiery demise, despite knowing that by doing so, he is creating a massive time paradox. Her own denouement in the super-spooky The Chimes of Midnight (2002) is one of the series’ true barnstormers.
C’rizz is a humanoid reptile taken on by that same Doctor during a trip to the Divergent Universe (The Creed of the Kromon, 2004). Erimem (short for Erimemushinterperem) is the rightful heir to the queenship of pharaonic Egypt, rescued by the Fifth Doctor (Eye of the Scorpion, 2001) from the assassins who denied a woman’s right to ascend the throne. She will ultimately gain an entirely different throne, on the world of Peladon.
Hex, Thomas Hector Schofield, is a male nurse who hooks up with the Seventh Doctor and Ace during the latest Cyber invasion (The Harvest, 2004); another Eighth Doctor cohort, Lucie Miller, is an unwitting beneficiary of a witness protection scheme being operated by the Time Lords, with no memory whatsoever of what she may have witnessed. And Iris Wildthyme (voiced by—of all people—Katy Manning, of Jo Grant fame) was a fellow time traveler whose own adventures have a loyal audience of their own.
It is a range, then, that offers something for everyone, and some of the past Doctors’ most spellbinding and thought-provoking adventures have arisen from it.
The Seventh Doctor adventure The Fearmonger (2000), a timely study of the rise of the political Far Right in a divided Britain that is not so divorced from the present day, draws at least some of its impact from Ace’s reactions to the racism that was endemic in the society portrayed in the TV adventure Remembrance of the Daleks.
The Eighth Doctor confronted the rampant hypocrisy of religious extremism in the form of a devil-worshipping American TV evangelist in Minuet in Hell (2001); and captivating shades of the Eleventh Doctor’s The Vampires of Venice (2011) can be drawn from the Eighth Doctor’s The Stones of Venice (2001), as a race of amphibious gondoliers fight to prevent the city from not sinking beneath the waves.
Spare Parts (2002) ranked among the greatest of all Cyber adventures, televised or otherwise, long before it became the loose foundation for Rise of the Cybermen (2006); and Jubilee, with its oft-times humorous look at a future world where the Dalek menace has not only been exterminated, it has been transformed into a thing of fun and fiction, stands similarly proud among that race’s greatest encounters with the Doctor.
Other Lives
No less than his continued half-life in audio form, the Doctor did not completely disappear from television following the show’s cancellation. True, it would have been a brave soul indeed who predicted that not only would it one day return, but that it would spawn no less than five companion series within three years of its return. But Doctor Who lingered on in spirit.
In 1993, the BBC’s annual Children in Need charity evening brought all of the surviving Doctors together for Dimensions in Time, a two-part, twelve-minute mini adventure that not only resurrected a few favorite old monsters, it also crossed over into the fictional world of the East Enders soap opera.
Six years later, a similarly impressive array of nominally future Doctors was gathered for the Comic Relief charity’s Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death. Rowan Atkinson, Richard E. Grant, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, and Joanna Lumley would all play fresh regenerations of the Doctor as he battled the Master (Jonathan Pryce) one final time.
Various independent companies, too, ventured very close to the copyright wind with a series of often enjoyable, if none-too-essential home video releases featuring familiar, and carefully chosen, characters from the show—namely, those whose names were not considered the BBC’s property.
A company called Reeltime produced Wartime, documenting the further adventures of UNIT Sergeant Benton, a supporting character during the Third Doctor’s reign; and the four-part P.R.O.B.E., starring the same regeneration’s first assistant, Liz Shaw. The Autons and the Sontarans both returned across various BBV video productions, along with a healthy crop of former series regulars (the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, and Victoria Waterfield, all played by their original actors), and only the somewhat primitive production values that are the bane of so many ambitious independents truly hamper Downtime, the Yeti-baiting best of all the BBV efforts. There were even a handful of distinctly Almost-The-Doctor roles offered up to actors Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor) and Sylvester McCoy (the Seventh) in further BBV efforts The Stranger and The Dominie.
The Daleks in outer space. Which is probably the best place for them.
All of these were simply stop gaps, of course; “adventures” that had no place within the Whoniverse, and that many diehard fans felt almost personally affronted by. Only with the parent show’s true return, in 2005, could that universe expand, and it wasted little time in doing do.
The first of the five spin-offs from the reborn show was Doctor Who Confidential, a regular “Making Of . . .” series that aired immediately after the main attraction throughout the show’s first six seasons. (An episode was shot to accompany the 2011 Christmas Special, The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe, but languished unscreened following the series’ peremptory cancellation.)
Similarly fact-based, albeit from a considerably more childlike angle, was Totally Doctor Who, a two-season series created by Children’s BBC and most notable for spawning The Infinite Quest, an animated miniseries that featured the voices of David Tennant (the Tenth Doctor) and Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones). Elsewhere, the show’s gist appeared to revolve around maintaining a preordained level of hysterical enthusiasm about anything and everything Whovian, and doubtless little children enjoyed it. Curiously, unlike Confidential, episodes have yet to appear as bonus features on any DVD releases.
Torchwood and Sarah Jane
The alien-busting Torchwood followed, debuting in October 2006 as the payoff to a series of Doctor Who adventures that fell over themselves in their attempts to pave the way for the new show, and in such clumsy fashion that the actual show could ultimately have been a disappointment. That it wasn’t was down to a brilliant cast led by John Barrowman—Captain Jack from the Empty Child/Doctor Dances cycle during the Ninth Doctor’s tenure; and Eve Myles, first sighted as the clairvoyant servant in The Unquiet Dead, now Gwen Cooper, a former policewoman transferred in to Torchwood.
Promoted with promises that Torchwood could take viewers to places that the Doctor, with his family-oriented audience, could never dream of, the new show did indeed live up to its brief of providing adult-themed science fiction (albeit, it must be said, at the occasional expense of what would have been a perfectly good story without the grown-up factors). The first-ever episode, on October 22, 2006, landed a record audience for the channel on which it was aired (2.4 million on BBC 3), and a second series, following the first in its “alien of the week” format, suggested that Torchwood was here for the long haul.
John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, Torchwood’s head honcho.
Photo courtesty of CleOpatra/Wikimedia Commons
Sadly, it was not to be. Opting to eschew long-term character development in favor of simply killing off two-fifths of the regular cast (foul-tempered action man Owen Harper and mild-mannered computer whiz Toshiko Sato), the show’s much-vaunted transfer to mainstream BBC 1 was enacted not with a fresh run of blinding adventures, but with a single plot tale (Children of Earth) spread out across five consecutive nights of the week.
There, another regular, the eternally ambiguous office dogsbody Ianto Jones was sacrificed, leaving just the increasingly preposterous multimedia wallpaper of Barrowman, and the correspondingly less charming Myles to front an even more vaunted move across the Atlantic for a BBC/Starz coproduction. Compared to the hopes and brilliance with which Torchwood was launched, Miracle Day might as well have been a different show altogether. Just as Torchwood evolved, in the viewer’s mind anyway, from Captain Jack’s introduction as a time-traveling rogue in The Empty Child, so both The Sarah Jane Adventures and K-9 sprang from their namesakes’ appearances in the Tenth Doctor adventure School Reunion.
Produced without any BBC input, the computer-animated K-9 did little to disprove the BBC’s own determination, back when K-9 and Company was aired in 1981, that the metal mutt probably wasn’t destined to become the Lassie of some future generation.
But the Sarah Jane Adventures, devised by the parent show’s own production team as a counter to CBBC’s original suggestion of The Young Doctor Who, defied any pessimistic presentiments by emerging closer in spirit to the “classic” Doctor Who than even the twenty-first-century version could muster.
Elizabeth Sladen, reprising her original role, led a revolving door of only marginally precocious child actors through a series of adventures that may, for the most part, have been Doctor Who-lite, but nevertheless addressed some remarkably chilling themes. An episode in which Sarah Jane’s childhood timeline is altered to incorporate her death in a tragic accident, and the survival of her best friend, as opposed to the other way around (Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane, 2007) was genuinely disturbing; another, in which companion Rani’s future self appears as an old, old lady and then battles to change her own timeline (The Mad Woman in the Attic, 2009) was likewise excellently plotted, scripted and played.
Other themes revolving around loss and alienation targeted sundry teenage neuroses spot-on, while guest appearances from both the Tenth Doctor and a handful of his favorite foes supplemented the Adventures’ own growing coterie of bespoke baddies. The show would certainly suffer its fair share of missteps (the glib replacement of Sarah Jane’s original, laboratory-spawned son with the abused daughter of an alien humanoid, for example); nevertheless, the four-and-one-half seasons shot and screened prior to Sladen’s sad death in April 2011 remain a milestone in recent children’s programming.
Sarah Jane Smith remains the only companion to have truly stepped out in her own right in the Doctor’s natural domain of television, although it was apparently close-run thing. Shortly after actress Billie Piper left Doctor Who, a ninety-minute special entitled Rose Tyler: Earth Defence had already been commissioned and budgeted before producer Russell T. Davies pulled the plug on it. It was, he said, “a spin-off too far.”
And maybe it was, although there is always someone who is willing to push even further than that—someone who not only raised the wrath of the BBC, but even made the British daily newspapers.
An unaddressed Doctor Who envelope. So how does it get delivered?
Is the world . . . in fact, will it ever be . . . ready for Dalek porn?
Erotic author Chrissie Bentley may or may not be alone in pursuing a tiny corner of fan fiction that she has christened Whorotica. In the world of fan video, however, Abducted by the Daleks is one of those precious little items whose premise is so absurd that the movie itself has taken on mythological qualities.
Released as a limited edition of one thousand DVDs in 2005, under the utterly unconvincingly disguise of Abducted by the Daloids, the fifty-six-minute movie had scarcely even gone on sale before the BBC blasted it into oblivion, the extermination as thorough as it was merciless.
Catch a copy on the internet, however, and Abducted by the Daleks is a laugh riot from the moment the credits roll with name checks for “Billy Hartnell,” “Patrick Baker,” and “Don Skaro.” And the plot continues in similar footsteps. Three young women, stumbling away from a fairly minor car wreck, find themselves alone in a dark wood, and therefore do what anybody would under those circumstances. They remove all their clothing, and two of them begin embracing one another, just in time to be teleported to an orbiting Dalek spaceship.
It takes them a moment to realize what has happened; in fact, not until one of the Daleks impatiently clears its throat in an attention-getting “ahem” kind of way do the two realize they are no longer in the woods. They are however, still naked, which naturally (naturally) ensures a full-body interrogation from the Daleks, and so it goes on (and on and on).
The Sun, an English newspaper of some repute, was first on the scene with news of the movie and delivered its own succinct summary. “Dr. Who’s foes capture three naked ‘disco babes’ in the 18-rated DVD. They chase the girls around their spaceship and grope them with their plungers.”
Indeed.
The finest words, however, were uttered by Tim Hancock, the director of Terry Nation’s estate. “The reason the Daleks are still the most sinister thing in the universe,” he told The Sun, “is because . . . they weren’t ever intended to be sexual creatures. Daleks do not do porn.”
No. But they did once pose for a girlie mag shoot with a naked Katy Manning (a naked Dalek; now there’s an image to conjure with), and Billie Piper’s first television role upon departing Doctor Who saw her playing a high-class call girl.
So maybe the two universes are not that far removed from one another.
Hmm. I’ll let you be the judge of that.