On car journeys we sometimes listen to Doctor Who audios together and for this weekend’s trip J. and I took the first two stories from Big Finish’s new ‘Lost Stories’ series. I fully expected to not like them much. I mean, these are stories that were pitched, written, dumped and deliberately lost back in 1986 – during the period popularly and fondly remembered as The Show’s nadir.
Except… Except I was always very fond of the Colin Baker Year(s). The stories were garish, crass, nonsensical, badly developed and scripted. They were often bizarrely violent and gruesome and macabre. They were over-lit and horribly designed. Key roles were often played by weirdly miscast actors, familiar from sitcoms and soaps. But I loved those stories. To me, more than ever during that period, the Doctor was a citizen of the universe. An arrogant and incredulous figure, stomping about in his yellow trousers and spats and coat-of-many-colours – as happy striding into the throne room of Princess Zog as he was up and down the back streets of the East End of London.
It was an outrageous time for The Show: short on genuine wit, reeling with gratuitous use of continuity points from the programme’s history and revelling in the sheer ugliness it managed to drum up on screen week after week. Technobabble and pantomime gestures existed side by side in a way that even Blake’s 7 hadn’t managed. And there was a roster of returning super villains – the Rani, the Master, Sil and Davros – all of them despicable, leeringly awful. The Show was more like the 60s Batman TV show than anything else.
Anyway, as history had it, that version of The Show was canned. Like anything oddly, truly original, it was sidelined abruptly, just as it was becoming truly great. I was so gutted at the time. I can’t even tell the story without feeling a little bit sickly, all over again. I was doing o levels and living in a world where I had to defend The Show on a daily basis to anyone who knew I still adored it. How everyone laughed at the Timelash, and the sequence that had Colin Baker dangling in that tinsel-strewn crystalline dimension made of polysteyrene. But I would never agree with them – ever! – that it needed a rest, or that it was no longer The Show it had been.
Legend has it there were completed scripts for what would have been the 1986 season… and I remember imagining what they might be like. Skip forward to this year – to this weekend’s car journey back to the North East for my sister’s birthday – and here we are listening to the first two of those stories.
And I adored them. They’re noisy, silly, nonsensical and completely ludicrous in places. Each plot hole from 1986 has been lovingly restored. Each stupid piece of exposition has been beautifully hand-crafted and reinstated. Individual flourishes of cack-handed imagineering have been recreated with a masterful magician’s touch.
This series is incredible. Even the incidental music has the genuine nerve-splitting noodling and electronic pinging and zinging that The Show delighted in back in the 80s. Colin Baker’s back at his HUGELY acerbic height, hose-spraying friend and enemy alike with his vitriol and scorn. Even when he mourns an enemy’s doom he does it COLOSSALLY, relishing each mellifluous syllable. And Peri, his american assistant is back to being near-hysterical in every scene. The only girl companion who could scream sarcastically while still sounding like she meant every word of it.
I love the colour and variety of all this. These tales belong to an era when The Show could and would take you anywhere. Even if the budget couldn’t allow it – they’d still have a bloody good go. In ‘The Nightmare Fair’ we’re behind the scenes at Blackpool Pleasure Beach and in ‘Mission to Magnus’ we’re on a dayglo planet with exploding ice caps and a race of domineering, brutish women who are clearly (even on audio) wearing pink Dusty Springfield wigs and nylon kinky boots and silver eyelashes. In just four episodes the Doctor’s been locked in mind games with a million year old Mandarin; played a deadly game of Space Invaders; wrestled with Ice Warriors and – rather surprisingly – told his wicked childhood nemesis to ‘Get stuffed..!’
There’s gleeful silliness as well as deadly danger, here. It’s serious, but never earnest. Dramatic, but never realistic in the slightest. And it’s never, ever boring. I’m looking forward to all the rest of this series. It’s something that needn’t ever have existed in the world. It’s a glorious folly. A folly someone’s patiently restored and then dropped a load of sticky paint and glitter on top.
And before these Lost Stories are over, we’re promised one written by Ingrid Pitt herself. My mind is boggling at the rescue of all of this trashy brilliance.