Title: 

Milestones: The first appearance of robotic companion Kamelion.

The Blurb: England, March 1215. King John is visiting the castle of Sir Ranulph Fitzwilliam. The arrival of the TARDIS disturbs a medieval joust, but the Doctor and his companions are proclaimed to be friendly demons by the King, who seems strangely interested in their “blue engine”.

It soon becomes clear that neither King John or his Champion, Sir Gilles Estram, are who they pretend to be. One of the Doctor’s oldest and deadliest enemies threatens the future of democracy of Earth, and he must be stopped! (Summary taken from BBC DVD cover)

Period Piece: If you’ve read some of my previous posts on this blog, it will likely come as not surprise to you that I am a fan of the Doctor’s historical adventures. Whatever other charms it has however, The King’s Demons is not a particularly good piece of historical storytelling as it has the Doctor present a skewed version of the signing of Magna Carta.

Still, in spite of these inaccuracies I can still find plenty to enjoy in this brief tale. For one thing, Gerald Flood gives a very theatrical rendering of King John that is quite gloriously over the top while the other supporting cast members all seem well cast and give very solid performances.

There’s even a jousting and a swordfighting sequence to really give the piece that period feel. While this may not be an ideal teaching tool, it is at least quite entertaining.

Master of Disguise: I suppose we are expected to be shocked at the sudden revelation of Sir Giles Estram’s real identity at the end of the first episode. Certainly the director, Tony Virgo, makes a valiant attempt to feature the character almost exclusively in long shot while Anthony Ainley employs an accent to try and disguise his voice.

It’s a nice idea but it doesn’t work. Ainley’s face is recognizable, even from a distance, while the accent is so unconvincing that there is no mistaking him for a French actor. In short, you know it is him early on.

Not that this is a problem in itself, but you do get left asking the question as to why exactly the Master is walking around medieval England in disguise anyway. The plan he has devised is not designed to trap the Doctor, nor is he likely to arose any suspicion with his usual appearance. Clearly his disguise serves no purpose.

Although it’s not as if the rest of his plan makes much sense either. Dudley’s script actually acknowledges how ridiculously small-scale the Master’s plan to prevent the signing of Magna Carta really is. At the very least it needed a good, triumphant speech laying out the course of events it would change, not only on Earth but throughout the galaxy.

Kamelion: There are two ways to assess Kamelion. The first, and perhaps most common, is to judge him as a companion to the Doctor. Even the kindest critics would argue that regardless of the storytelling possibilities Kamelion brings that this was a misguided move given the limitations of the prop itself.

Though I do agree with the view above, we can also judge Kamelion’s role specifically within this story which I consider to be quite effective. With its field of motion kept limited to a few, relatively simple movements and used in its robotic form in only a handful of scenes, it certainly does not embarrass the production. Indeed, I think it looks rather striking with its slight movements and certainly boasts a novelty factor.

But while I have no problem with the use of Kamelion specifically within this story, I do think he should never have been allowed into the Doctor’s TARDIS.

In Review: With some dodgy history and one of the Master’s least impressive plans to date, The King’s Demons ought to fall entirely flat. In spite of those problems however I find it to be quite a charming tale, elevated with some good performances from the guest cast, entertaining action and a quick pace.

Brazil, 2080: The Doctor and Turlough arrive for the Rio de Janeiro carnival.
Is wealthy heiress Ileana de Santos all that she seems? What sinister ailment afflicts her invalid son, tended by the mysterious Dr Hayashi? And who exactly is Rosa, engaged on a secret quest to fulfil the destiny of her extinct tribe?
Time is running out for Rosa, Ileana and the Doctor, as the fearsome shadow of an ancient werewolf moves ever closer…

Written By: Marc Platt
Directed By: Nicholas Pegg

I’m just going to start this off by saying that I was not a huge fan of Marc Platt going into this audio drama based entirely on his earlier contributions to Doctor Who, a TV episode called Ghost Light and a book called Lungbarrow. In fact, I would rather watch the terrible charity episode Dimensions in Time than sit through Ghost Light again. Thankfully, Platt seems to be on his A-game in Big Finish as I thought Loups Garoux was quite enjoyable. This is surprising as I think that Davison has got the worst scripts of all the Doctors (up to this point); a problem that seems to be sorted out.

First thing first, Turlough is awesome and I was pretty excited to hear Mark Strickson reprise the role in this drama. This isn’t just a guest role either; Turlough is up in the forefront of this whole play. As listeners, we get a glimpse at his mysterious darker nature, a fact that he has hidden from the Doctor and the other companions. He gets separated from the Doctor at one point (as with many Doctor Who stories), and takes center stage for a bit, even getting his own temporary companion in the mix. We also see a bit of a reluctant romance for not only Turlough, but the Doctor as well (Gasp!). This added romance is surprising for those familiar with Platt’s writing as Platt himself created the ridiculous “The Doctor is Asexual and Timelords are born in looms” garbage found in Lungbarrow, a piece of novelized fanwank that many fans cling to despite countless contradictory pieces throughout the show.

The rest of the actors are pretty solid as well, especially Emily Bron as Ileana. She plays the matriarchal leader of a group of old-world werewolves clinging to a hidden existence in the future. Despite a few wonky stereotypical accents, there really was nobody to single out as the weak link of the production. Everyone had their part, and everyone was important here. Even the Fifth Doctor, who did very little in his past few plays, was on top form here both in Peter Davison’s acting and the storyline itself.

The actual story is a solid plus from me as well, as it delves into the topic of werewolves without zany Hollywood movie hijinks. The creatures are treated in a manner that I’m not used to, and I really liked it. Basically these wolf creatures live among us, but use an ability to stay hidden from our eyes. While this isn’t exactly talked about at length, it’s sufficient to explain why we don’t have huge wolves walking around all the time. Of course the wolves can also take a human form, something that sickens a few of them to their core. This shape shifting is more-or-less the basis for the main plot. You see, Ileana has a son that can’t turn to a human appearance. She wants her son to be able to walk amongst the “cut-claws”, but he has a feral monstrous disposition and appearance. Oh and there is an ancient demonic former ex-lover of hers out there trying to kill the other wolves!

I guess I gained a new-found respect for Marc Platt, a writer who I was not too enamored with in the past. I’ve actually listened to one more of his Big Finish plays that I enjoyed, but that’s a review for another day. In closing, if you want a solid Peter Davison title to start out with in Big Finish, you could probably pass on the ones before this, as Loups Garoux is definitely a new benchmark for this Doctor.

I really, really hated the ‘special edition’ of Planet of Fire on this release, and remember the spite pouring from me as I wrote the curt few lines about it below. It felt quite brutal, but when I saw it again on the printed page, it wasn’t so cutting. A lesson, there. 

This box set may come with special ‘K’ branding, but it’s not our front-and-centre cover star who’s the main attraction. Oh my dear Kamelion, you have been naive! Within, the seldom-spotted chrome companion is comprehensively outclassed by the Master, who capers through both stories, mugging away in manner we’re moved to describe as… quite masterly.

But let’s avert our eyes from this mesmeric personage for a moment, and lay in the plot.

Originally broadcast over two nights in 1983, the first offering – The King’s Demons – deposits the Fifth Doctor in GCSE History syllabus-era Britain to meet Bad King John on the eve of signing Magna Carta. Alas, the monarch isn’t quite himself. In fact he’s Kamelion who’s been put into play, out of sheer badness, by the Master.

In the great platter of Doctor Who stories, ‘Demons is small fry. But while it may be conceptual whitebait, it comes with excellent catering. As a wise(cracking) man once noted, every story written by Terence Dudley stops for a buffet. Here, the stakes are low but that suckling pig is delicious! At table, nibbling away, is King’s champion Sir Gilles Estram. He’s not real either, he’s the Master in disguise. Ham, anyone?

Anthony Ainley’s portrayal of the French taunter doesn’t evoke Gallic, or even garlic, roots. Instead he opts to play the part with a comedy Indian accent, thankfully stopping short of wobbling his head and declaring “Goodness gracious, mead!” when the drink arrives. It’s a disgraceful turn. James Stoker should sue.

Dodgy disguise discarded at the end of part one, it’s a relief to let Ainley get back to the day job, and from here on in the Master’s jousting is very good.  With sheer nonchalance he hands the Doctor the TCE, certain his enemy’s surfeit of “moral scruples” will mean there’ll be no Action Man action today. Then, when the Time Lords lock brains over Kamelion’s appearance, he even goes so far as to hint at a coming plot arc: “You’re getting old, Doctor! Your will is weak! It’s time you regenerated!”

Throughout all this, a Mutley-esque Ainley never once brings a sense of reality to proceedings. But it’s finely judged, because this is a script that calls upon him to smite his enemies with alliterative epithets such as “Medieval misfits!” When the jig is up, and Kamelion is inducted into the Doctor’s crew, the Master simply leaves. It’s all been a bit of a prank.

Well, that’s The King’s Demons – fun, but insubstantial. The kind of stopover you’d imagine the TARDIS team making between adventures. That’s not to say it’s completely without meat. The business between Tegan and the Doctor regarding the inclement castle conditions – “How can they live in such cold?”/ “By eating lots of food” – is a fine detail and sets up a subtle scene wherein the duo are led into a chamber which sports just the one bed. “Another way of keeping warm,” remarks the Time Lord, tartly.

It’s the occasional knowing line that stops proceedings becoming wholly indistinguishable from something shown under the banner of Programmes for Schools and Colleges. Because, at the point where Peter Howell’s overly tuneful and under-funded music comes in, it feels like an anthropomorphised typewriter ball is about to float on and hold up proceedings while it points out to “Word Watchers” the nuances of the apostrophe in the story’s title.

All of this, and nary a comment about Kamelion. It’s probably as inauspicious an intro as he deserves. As Nicola Bryant points out in one of the DVD documentaries, his shape-shifting shtick leaves him devoid of his own character. “Where will I be quartered?” asks the robot upon joining the TARDIS. Off-screen for a year, as it happens.

The four-part Planet of Fire from 1984 picks up his plight. Written by Peter Grimwade, it’s a to-do list of a tale, ploughing its way through an unremitting remit: Write out Kamelion, write out Turlough, kill off the Master, bring in new companion Peri… oh, and can we go to Lanzarote, please?

Again, we’re hypnotically drawn to the renegade Time Lord, who, despite enjoying another dual role, is left diminished… in every sense. When he gains control of Kamelion’s form for the end-of-part-one ‘Oh look, it’s the Master’ reveal, he’s not so much a portent of doom, more a proponent of bad grooming. Has his goatee ever appeared so poorly fixed? The thing is nearly making its own lunge for Peri! Talk about bristling with menace…

However, this is just one of many indignities meted out to him. It’s in the Master’s sparring with Miss Brown the story paradoxically hits high and low points. Most of the time the newcomer’s running rings around the villain, sending the old duffer spread-eagled across the TARDIS, writing him off as a “gangster” and even answering back. He is the Master! “So what?” she snaps, foreshadowing her relationship with the Sixth Doctor. “I’m Perpugilliam Brown and I can shout just as loud as you can!”

All great for her, not so good for him. But, the greatest humiliation is yet to come as Peri discovers the real Master reduced to rodent-size and living in an evil shoebox. Like Spider-Man once said, it’s a heel for a heel as Peri sets about clobbering him with her stiletto. The whole sequence is a shoo-in (pun intended) for the most hilarious and belittling (intended) scene in Doctor Who history. Scurrying for the innards of the TARDIS console, there’s one last ignominy in store: that black-clad Masterly arse disappearing from view as he tumbles inside.

In comparison to all this, the rest of the story dims – Edward Highmore all wet-lipped and rounded-vowels as Malkon (or, to my ear, ‘Malcolm’), Peter Wyngarde is nicely grandiloquent but dull (despite the guy-liner) as Timanov. And then there’s a fleet of generic followers and rebels, too wrapped up in cod-mystical mithering to command any interest.

However, it’s full marks to the Lanzarote location, which more than justifies the production team’s beano España. As an alien planet, its landscapes of calcified larva are one of the best ever presented in the series, and arguably never topped until last year’s Planet of the Dead. Granted, the effect’s a little diluted by early scenes set in the suspiciously similar looking real-life Canary Island, but then we can probably assume the production team negotiated excellent terms for shooting, providing the island itself got a plug. Worth it.

But where Planet of Fire really delivers is in its valedictory curtain call for Turlough. While The King’s Demons sidelined him to the role of Man Looking Out Of Window Sulkily, in his final tale he’s squeezed into a pair of preposterously short shorts and fleshed out into something approaching a real character. His relationship with the Doctor is put through some genuine tumult (“If you’re holding back anything that will aid the Master, our friendship is at an end,” growls the Time Lord) and he’s afforded a few zingers (musing on the worst place in the universe: “English public school”). Against all the odds the departure of this intergalactic political refugee actually means something. “I don’t want to go Doctor,” he says. “I’ve learned a lot from you.”

But what about Kamelion? What’s he learned? His was a story that began on Xeriphas and now it ends – as ever – statically, lying adjacent to a numismaton gas surge on Sarn. Happily his final refrain also hints at some new insight: “Kamelion no good. Sorry.”

DVD extras

This box set comes stacked with additional material, the best of which is located on The King’s Demons disc. Here you’ll find Kamelion – Metal Man in which those guilty for his creation account for their crimes. Script Editor Eric Saward is partially culpable, revealing he and producer John Nathan Turner bought the pup from firm CP Cybernetics before checking out if it could walk. The beast’s co-creator, Chris Padmore, also pops up with a salutary lesson for other young robots courting quick fame. Accompanying him is Kamelion’s head, eye sockets rolling around dementedly. Long since on his uppers, the metal mickey-taker is presumably now making ends meet as a decapitated Nookie Bear impersonator. Hey, it’s all about niche markets nowadays…

Optical organs will continue to rotate courtesy of the Magna Carta documentary, which commits a number of grievous sins. Aside from jauntily wondering aloud what The King’s Demons has to do with “this man” (cue: Osama Bin Laden!), it adopts a strategy of repurposing historical Who footage by running it through a crappy Photoshop paintbrush filter. The script isn’t a work of art either. Positing the complicated-to-set-up notion that if we didn’t know every historical detail about the charter’s signing “we might be in danger of coming over as a bunch of ignorant peasants” it then concludes this line of thought with a segue so tortured it would be Typex-ed out of a linking script on The One Show: “In which case we wouldn’t look too out of place if we went on holiday to England in 1215!”

However, the greatest folly is on The Planet of Fire disc, which sports a ‘special edition’ of the story worked up by original director Fiona Cumming and DVD producer Brendan Sheppard. It’s horrible. The notion of trying to pimp up a 26-year-old TV story so that it somehow looks like a film speaks of both latter day snobbery and loathing for the original form. What’s the point? Aside from anything else, no-one has ever expressed the opinion this is a tale undersold by its production values, or clamoured for a new intro featuring t-shirt wearing space pilots, ice-cream-like explosions and – let’s be frank – not very good brand new special effects. Worse, in this edit they’ve removed Peri chasing the mini Master around with her shoe! Please, save this hobby shop stuff for YouTube.

Three further documentaries about the story round out the release, taking Fiona Cumming and designer Malcolm Thornton back to Lanzarote for some pleasant, if not especially revelatory, remembrances, while the remaining cast and crew chip in, speaking from what looks like the Master’s shoebox.

Finally there’s a perfunctory tribute to Anthony Ainley, which mainly pulls upon resources already accessed here, but is thoroughly enlivened by archive footage of the man himself, holding court at a 1990s convention. “The telephone went,” says Ainley, remembering his casting for the role. “The chap said, ‘It’s the BBC’. I said, ‘It’s alright, I’ll pay for the call’.”

Ho ho ho! Let’s have it again: Quite masterly!

The story: arriving in England in 1215, the Doctor uncovers a plot by the Master to pervert the course of Earth’s history. Er, and that’s about it.

Watching ‘The King’s Demons’, one starts to suspect that writer Terence Dudley also recognised that the Master had become a less than impressive threat, and decided to exploit this for something approximating comic effect. Nobody sniggers, however, as Master actor Anthony Ainley wanders around proceedings lumbered with a ginger wig and a French accent, something Ainley gamely attempts but proves utterly incapable of. (‘What accent is that?’ asked the Monkey, a Who ingenue, watching with me. ‘Pakistani?’ Well, yes, but not intentionally.) You wonder quite why Sir Gilles Estram — another thing the 80s Master enjoyed, as though aware he was being watched by a young audience, was indulging in a series of pseudonyms as silly as his disguises — couldn’t have simply been an English-accented aristo: it’s not as if ‘Estram’ is even a French surname. Dudley continues poking fun at the Doctor’s nemesis — a sometimes suave, sometimes unhinged psychotic who has, in his time, variously attempted to raise the devil, blackmail the entire universe, and resurrect a dead race to lay waste to the galaxy — by here having him trying to prevent the signing of Magna Carta. Even the Doctor sighs that this is small beer by the Master’s standards, and the script bungles things further by totally failing to turn this into a bigger threat by describing what chaos the Master could wreak if successful. History could fall apart like a smashed watch — civilisations fail, empires founder, the future unravel in devastating ways — yet the Doctor seems not to take the possibility seriously, as if he’s aware this is a two-part story and the solution will turn up within the half-hour.

There is a hint that Dudley toyed with the implications, though. Intriguingly, Tegan maintains that King John was meant to have signed Magna Carta under duress, and the Doctor rejects this statement (though her history is better than his, it seems). In the context of the stort — if we assume that in the Who universe the Doctor is right and Tegan wrong — this could have been an early clue to the Doctor that history is being led astray. Thus we miss out on an exciting twist, though we do at least avoid another chance to lecture Tegan in an interminable TARDIS bickering scene, an opportunity this era rarely passed up, entire episodes seemingly bolted on to otherwise serviceable scripts so that the regulars could snipe at one another (not literally) for twenty-five minutes.

I wondered, watching this, whether another element from Doctor Who‘s own history might at one time have been considered for ‘The King’s Demons’. The Meddling Monk, a largely comical foil to the First Doctor, seems a far more apt choice for the villain: his schemes are mischievous rather than diabolical, and focus on his fondness for upsetting (or trying to) the course of established history. Just as a Saxon tomb hides his time machine in ‘The Time Meddler’ (1965), so too the Iron Maiden of this story is the Master’s TARDIS in disguise (a flimsy disguise too — extras struggle to struggle with an obviously polystyrene door at one point). But it was not to be: in these days, a time meddler of any variety really always had to be the Master (at least until the woebegotten Rani turns up a few years later).

A two-parter screened across two evenings, ‘The King’s Demons’ is best watched in that format too. It’s only as complicated as it needs to be, and the short form leaves very little for two companions to do. Turlough looks out a window, pats a horse, and is incarcerated, while Tegan wafts around with the Doctor, making the occasional helpful comment — though he still tries to ditch her at the end of the story in favour of new companion Kamelion. This is the story’s McGuffin, a shape-shifting robot with an agreeable temperament, who’s been the Master’s puppet (almost literally) in his plans, impersonating King John (a highly entertaining performance by Gerald Flood, giving it his theatrical best — a shame the other actors weren’t encouraged to ‘heighten’ things likewise, as for a short story that might have worked rather well), and the subject of a strangely undramatic climactic battle of wills between the Master and the Doctor for, as it were, possession of his soul. Kamelion looks delightful — a tinfoil cherub, wired articulated fingers picking at a lute — and if his expressions are somewhat limited they are at least appropriately benign to reflect his amiable persona (a sort of pewter C-3PO, without the chipper personality). With the lessons of K9 apparently forgotten, the production team decided against the more sensible option of a man in a costume as Kamelion and opted instead for a remote controlled robot, which explains why the companion appeared only briefly in the show thereafter. (One of the programmers who designed and built Kamelion suffered a fatal accident and nobody else truly knew how to fully operate the robot.)

As a sidenote, it’s interesting to remark the Fifth Doctor’s apparent determination to fill the TARDIS with as many companions as possible, customarily travelling with two or three assistants. He’s far more charitable in this regard than the post-20o5 Doctor who explicitly — in ‘The Long Game’, ‘Planet of the Dead’ — ‘auditions’ would-be companions, rejecting those who don’t meet his moral standards. The Fifth Doctor, a breezier and rather less judgmental figure, is more all-embracing, suggesting that the Time War brought out this unforgiving side to the later Doctor: perhaps someone let him down rather badly in that unseen conflict?

‘The King’s Demons’ is a strange little confection, like those other two-part Davison Doctor Whos ‘Black Orchid’ (1982) and ‘The Awakening’ (1984).  There’s nothing really wrong with any of these stories: ‘Demons’ is well-acted, it looks great, and (which is more than you can say for those other two) introduces a new bit of Who lore, albeit a short-lived and short-circuiting one. The problem is it’s inconsequential, despite that: while as much incident as in an old six-parter can (sometimes) be crammed into a single 45-minute twenty-first century Doctor Who episode, no-one seems to have twigged how to pace these fifty minutes. This could be a frantic and exciting runaround, yet there are an inordinate number of scenes where people are arrested, imprisoned, freed, recaptured etc. Despite these faults it’s quite a charming story — if still, like the Master’s disguise, somewhat slight.

Today Big Finish Productions released the much-awaited Doctor Who audio adventure Cobwebs, a a four part story by Jonathan Morris.  It’s noteworthy as it is the first time in 26 years that the 5th Doctor ensemble of Peter Davison (The Doctor), Janet Fielding (Tegan Jovanka), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Mark Strickson (Vislor Turlough) are all together for a Doctor Who adventure of any kind.  Here’s the trailer:

It’s the first of 3 audios featuring the 4 actors together.  As much as I like the Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories, there’s always been a sense of incompleteness when the crew was doing separate audio stories or companion chronicles.  I just listened to it, and it was like coming home again.  I was grinning the entire time.  Plus the story is a very good time travel one, complex without being mind-numbing.

You can order Doctor Who: Cobwebs online or purchase it for download on the Big Finish website.

Big Finish Audio “Quick Review”

Let me get one thing straight before going into this audio drama review: on a whole I am not a huge fan of most 1980’s Doctor Who stories when stacked up to anything else.  I buy the DVDs, watch all of the stories, and read the comics, but I prefer the modern way the show is told, or just about anything before John Nathan Turner took the show over.  Not that I don’t like the actors that played the Doctor during this time, I just find the show a tad “hit or miss” in the decade of excess.  The audio plays, as a whole, have helped me really appreciate those actors that I may have never given much of a chance to.  This can be attributed to both maturity of the actors, and let’s face it, solid production quality.  I went into Phantasmagoria assuming that I would not like it due to it starring Peter Davison, and was greatly surprised to find a well acted, well written, if somewhat goofy episode.

I had heard of Phantasmagoria long before I actually listened to the production, as it was written by mark Gatiss, and was supposedly the template for his 2005 televised episode The Unquiet Dead.  I’m not sure where folks keep dragging that up, as the two stories have nothing in common save the period setting.  The play stars the Fifth Doctor and Turlough as played by Peter Davison and Mark Strickson respectively.  Aside from the usual cast of Big Finish Players, I did notice cameos from Mark Gatiss and David Williams, who later went on the create the super popular show Little Britain is side roles, so that was fun playing “spot the person whose voice I know”.

The Story involves The Doctor’s arrival in London of 1702, a time of highwaymen and strange disappearances.  When folks start to turn up dead clutching playing cards, a local occultist seems to think that spirits are on the loose, but the doctor thinks differently.

Being early in the Big Finish run, I would like to cut this play some slack due to its early release (being the second one made), but I can honestly say that for all the good in this episode, there was unfortunately some bad as well.  The one thing I really picked up on was that a few of the actors took to their roles a bit too much, if you get my drift and came across a bit too campy for my taste.  This would be commonplace for the TV show at the time, but audio dramas are a bit different.

All in all Phantasmagoria is better than the Sirens of Time simply by having a better, less convoluted narrative, but still suffers by being early in the run.  The acting, sound effects, and story are pretty solid, but the play suffers from a few over-actors, and a bit of storyline padding.  Big Finish is just hitting their stride, can’t wait to listen to the next one.

My Rating 3.25 out of 5

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Doctor Who: The Companion Chronicles – Freakshow
A new adventure for the Fifth Doctor, Turlough and Tegan
Starring Mark Strickson as Turlough and Toby Longworth as Winklemeyer

Aboard the TARDIS, Turlough records a testimony about a recent adventure. A trip to Buzzard Creek in the USA, where he encountered the sinister Winklemeyer, who claims to have discovered a cure for every known illness…

If you missed it on page 12 of the 31 March issue, hit up www.bigfinish.com/dwm and enter the code 5844.  The offer has been running for awhile and expires 26 May 2010, so don’t delay.

While you’re there, why not subscribe to some of their ranges?  I currently subscribe to two.

You can guess from that cast list that this is something special. Not only is Zagreus the fiftieth story from Big Finish, it was released in November 2003, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Doctor Who. Ostensibly the first in the third season of Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor stories, and a conclusion to the Zagreus plot-line begun in Neverland (which ended with McGann’s Doctor consumed by and having become Zagreus), it soon encompasses five Doctors, including Jon Pertwee (who by this point had been dead for seven years!) and a whole host of former Doctor Who companions, including for the first time in the Big Finish range, Elizabeth Sladen, John Leeson and Louise Jameson. There is a caveat to all those names: none of them, apart from India Fisher and Paul McGann (and right at the end McCoy, Baker and Davison) play their ordinary character. Even McGann plays two roles. Zagreus, then, is an attempt to be big, bold and dramatic. But does it work?

The previous story, Neverland, made reference to Peter Pan. Zagreus makes reference to Alice in Wonderland. Charley Pollard, stuck and terrified aboard the TARDIS with Zagreus, is shown a moment from her past, a book, a copy of Alice in Wonderland, but not everything is as it appears. Zagreus, looking for a way out of the TARDIS, is drawn to the library, where the disembodied voice of Jon Pertwee guides him to a book that cannot be moved but by human (or Time Lord) hands. That book, yup, it’s Alice in Wonderland. So begins what is at times a truly ridiculous story, and at others a mind-boggling one. Charley is our Alice, and we follow her down the rabbit hole.

Charley is taken firstly to 1950s England, where on a military base a scientist is attempting to open a portal to another universe. Then she is taken to secret lab belonging to Rassilon, who was also attempting to open a portal to another universe, and where vampiric Time Lords await, and final to the end of time, where in an amusement park, robotic animals fight against nursery rhyme characters over the remains of their creator, a Walt Disney-esque figure called Walton “Uncle Winky” Winkle, before the heavens are torn apart by a portal from another universe. From even this concise a summing up, one can tell that Zagreus is pretty out there. Bonnie Langford playing Goldilocks, or Sophie Aldred as a duck – we got them all here.

Big Finish must certainly be applauded for attempting something so completely original for the fortieth anniversary of Doctor Who – as I heard Alan Barnes and Gary Russell explaining in a making of, two or more Doctors teaming up to solve a problem has been done, and done to death, so something new was needed. Therefore having McCoy, Baker and Davison play new roles is entirely liberating: and I particularly loved Davison’s man of God, the Reverend Matthew Townsend, and he would make a great character in another story. Baker gets to overact wonderfully playing Provost Tepesh (in the making of he delights at the casting) and McCoy, well McCoy as Uncle Winky hints at such depths of weirdness I thought I’d wandered into a David Lynch audio-play.

So then, as a fortieth anniversary tribute – yes, it works. It gets the spirit of Doctor Who: Who has always been about myth and legend, science and faith, logic and instinct, and Zagreus plays on all of these, especially the first two. By ending in a world where fairytale battles constructed reality, having Charley Pollard become Alice, and having a monster, Zagreus, a monster that is entirely made out of myth, it allows Doctor Who to become symbolic, to become dramatic, and to become renewed.

As an opening for the beginning of a new season of stories of the Eighth Doctor – McGann must have been delighted to be getting such an opening, and such great lines (I particularly enjoyed they way in which the writers twisted an Alice in Wonderland trope into a discussion of quantum mechanics. The sort of thing you can only get away with in science-fiction. McGann seizes his dual role as The Doctor and Zagreus with relish, and proves again why he is and was chosen to play Doctor Who – and makes me yearn all the more for a chance to see him play the role on television again (he really would have been good). But it is in the final scenes, after Zagreus is gone, and The Doctor has changed because of the experience – that he accepted and yearned for death – that Zagreus truly comes to life. I had goosepimples listening to these final few minutes. At the time I was walking along a quiet beach, listening to this story, and I stopped, and watched the waves, and heard him say goodbye to Charley Pollard and it made me cry. I am sure that Russell T. Davies has heard this story, for its ending reminded me so much of The Tenth Doctors parting with Rose. Before Davies got there, Barnes and Russell have found a true emotional depth to Doctor Who.

With The Eighth Doctor off to explore the alternate universe, and forbidden to return by the Time Lords, a new beginning opens up for The Doctor. A new world of stories, a new world of legends…

But wait, who is that hiding onboard the TARDIS..? Charley Pollard, proving to be one of the great companions, just won’t take no as answer and isn’t quite done with The Doctor…

Q: How did you go about getting into acting?

A: I did the National Youth Theatre for two years, and then I applied for RADA. I think something like 4,000 people applied for 20 places, and who can tell which are the most talented 20? I was lucky to get in. It was great training. From RADA, I then joined a theatre company that works on narrow boats, and we toured on the narrow boat, I did that for two and a half years, and from that I went into ‘Angels’ and then ‘Doctor Who’.

Q: How did you get the job on ‘Doctor Who’?

A: I’d been working on ‘Angels’, which was a hospital soap opera set in Birmingham, and I played a Brummie ambulance guy. John Nathan-Turner’s partner Gary Downie was working as a production manager on ‘Angels’, and I went from ‘Angels’ to ‘Juliet Bravo’. The guy who had the lead in ‘Angels’ happened to get ill, and ‘Angels’ wanted met to take the lead. Like any actor, it’s wonderful to be offered a regular job in a soap opera, but it’s a big decision to make and I thought ‘Well I’ll have a cast around’ and I rang my agent and she said ‘You’re up for a regular part in Doctor Who’, so I took my life into my own hands, knocked on John Nathan-Turner’s door and read for John, he said ‘I can’t promise you anything, but we’ve very interested’. It’s never happened to me before, it’ll never happen to me again, but on the same day I was having to choose between two regular parts, in ‘Angels’ and ‘Doctor Who’.

Q: Why did you choose ‘Doctor Who’?

A: Well, I felt the part in ‘Doctor Who’ was nearer to me. Peter, to take an example, Peter Davison, when he got his breaks in television, he was playing himself, people like you to be yourself, and he’s very relaxed. If you can be yourself, you come across better. And I thought the character of Turlough, well he wasn’t like me, he was an evil sod, but he was more like me than playing Teddy (in ‘Angels’).

Q: So you got the job. What did you do?

A: I did a ‘Juliet Bravo’ in between and then I turned up on the first day of the shoot in North London for my first episode. I’d been out with the wardrobe lady and chosen my costume. I realised soon after getting the job that it wasn’t going to be just another television job. The publicity involved was enormous. I hadn’t realised – I hadn’t watched ‘Doctor Who’ as a child because I didn’t have a television, I watched some episodes of Pat Troughton – I realised very soon after getting the job that it was a cult thing. John had said to me ‘You’ll have to go to the States a lot to publicise the programme’. So yes, I was nervous, but people often ask ‘Did you enjoy working with Doctor Who?’, I got on very well with John and Eric Saward in the office, and I thought ‘This is a really nice cast’.

Q: How would you sum up that first story?

A: It was great, when I got the script, because I had lots of lines! The more lines you’ve got, the easier it is to be good. It’s much easier to settle into something. I remember John Nathan-Turner says to me, because I was masquerading as a public school boy, and in general I’ve got quite a Midlands voice, and John said ‘Do you think you can sound a bit posher, Mark?’, but I don’t think I ever managed it. That was a problem on the first day, but John was very good about it. I had a great time.

Q: Up next is ‘Terminus’.

A: A very depressing story. Ghastly. Poor old Sarah Sutton, her last story. Very worthy stuff, Florence Nightingale stuff. Grey sets. I think that was the one where I spent a hell of a lot of time with Janet, crawling around. I wore through the knees on my trousers.

Q: You were playing this terrible traitor, really. Did you start to realise you were going to spend a lot of time staring into a glowing crystal?

A: Yes, I did. I also realised that the crystal burnt my hand after twenty seconds. In order to make the crystal work in the studio, it had to be very strong light, it had to be on a wire, tiny little thing, down my sleeve, down my leg and it was attached to a car battery, with a chap running round with me with a car battery. After about twenty seconds it used to get so hot. So get your stopwatches out and time the longest I hold that cube in my hand.

Q: Following that, ‘Enlightenment’.

A: Yes, yes, this is memorable for one particular reason. Great cast, wonderful to work with. But there was one occasion where I throw myself off the ship. You use a company called Kirby Wire, and it’s Kirby Wire’s insurance, I presume, they strap you into a think like Peter Pan and you trust them. You throw yourself off into space and hope for the best, so I dutifully threw myself into space off this ship going through the universe, and half the harness broke. It was a bit like jumping onto a brick wall with your legs apart from twenty feet. Any man will be able to appreciate what that was like. It was terrible, I couldn’t walk. There were some shots scheduled from after that, I don’t know if there are any out-takes from that, but I almost blacked out from pain. If you look in that story, you’ll see there are certain scenes in which I don’t move, and those are scenes shot after that. I’m remarkably stationary. Fortunately there was no permanent damage. There was regional swelling.

Q: A lot of people who’ve played companions complain about the quality of the scripts, and the way their characters decline. Did you feel that?

A: Not the quality of the scripts, I think the quality of the scripts was very good when I was in ‘Doctor Who’, but the problem for me, I’d been the villain for eight episodes, now I had to travel with the Doctor, there are only a certain number of occasions that the Doctor can be stupid enough not to notice someone trying to kill him. Turlough had a brain, he could go off and have another plot, and that would have been fine if there’d been time, but in the context of four twenty-five minute episodes, you set the plot up, and then it was very hard to put another sub-plot in, there wasn’t time for Turlough. I understood that. I never went to John and complained. I could see they had a problem, I’m sure they were applying their brains to it. Turlough worked well when he was intrinsic to the plot, and when he wasn’t you had to lock him up.

Q: Moving on to ‘The King’s Demons’, was that problem surfacing there?

A: Very much so. ‘The King’s Demons’ is memorable because it rained on location. Watch it and have a look. For anybody who hasn’t worked on television, rain is hardly ever picked up by the camera, if you want it to look like it’s raining, it’s very hard. So try and spot it in ‘The King’s Demons’, there’s torrential rain. I’d never worked with horses before, and there was a horse in that and Anthony Ainley rides it, Jasper, and Anthony couldn’t ride at all. And Jasper was a trooper, a mountainous horse, and it would do whatever the chap told it. The problem is he wouldn’t do more than one take. Highly intelligent animal. In the jousting scenes, he smiled at the camera! But if you wanted to do another take, he wouldn’t do it. That was a complete revelation to me, and great fun to watch because I didn’t have much to do.

Q: In ‘The Five Doctors’, there are so many characters…

A: How could any character have a decent slice of the cake in ‘The Five Doctors’? You knew you’d get a little bit. The great thing about that was working with so all those people. I met Pat Troughton for the first time, who had been my Doctor when I was a child. It was great to watch them work. We did all my stuff, and I went on holiday all around Wales, and there was a hair on the gate and they needed to film the whole thing again. So we had to go back and shoot quite a lot again. It was absolutely perishing cold, which was often the case in ‘Doctor Who’.

Q: What about ‘Warriors of the Deep’?

A: I think people think television is more complicated than it is. In TC1, Television Centre 1, you had to finish by ten o’clock, there was a chap somewhere who pulled the plug on all the lights, you had to finish by ten and if that was your last day in the studio, it was disaster if you had to set it up again next time you came into the studio. No director wanted to do that. On this occasion, we were running well to schedule, but about five to six minutes before we finished they realised they’d got lots of shots of the Sea Devils being gassed, but they didn’t have them dying and falling over, as cut-aways. So at the last minute, all the Sea Devils rushed back onto the set, and the production manager was shouting ‘Sea Devils, Sea Devils, Sea Devils! Die! Die! Die! Now go over there! Die! Die! Die!’. These people were madly running everywhere, and dying and getting up.

Q: The Myrka was a joke, wasn’t it?

A: We’d done all this stuff with the guys in rehearsal, and we got in there and all the Myrka could do… It wasn’t even dry when it got into the studio! It was lack of budget, everyone was working as hard as they could. And you have to pretend you’re running for your life, ‘Oh my goodness, Doctor, it’s the Myrka!’. In one of the first scenes, Janet had to kick the Myrka, and she fell over and got paint all over her.

Q: The next story was ‘The Awakening’.

A: What was Turlough doing? He got locked up. I watched it last night and it was twice as good as I remember it being. It was a nice script, visually very nice, lovely weather. I was reminded that when I break out of the shed, that sort of SAS stuff and I say ‘Stiff upper lip, old boy’, I couldn’t get through that door. I was throwing myself at that door. And then when I did, when you watch it, I made a gap in it, I had to do two huge ones, when I came out of there I had a huge bruise on my door. Explosions have a big part in ‘Doctor Who’, and Peter’s examining a box on a hill in ‘Mawdryn Undead’, they cleared a big area, stopped people walking their dogs, but during I think ‘Terminus’ there was a character who had to put a piece of gel in a corridor, it was Liza Goddard, and Dominic Goddard was playing the sidekick or whatever, and the explosion was massive, it destroyed half the set. Liza Goddard shouted ‘What the fuck was that?’. And on the news that night, the news was being broadcast live, and there was an explosion in the background and I think the newsreader thought it was the IRA. They had to dub over Liza Goddard’s lines.

Q: You did some dribbling in ‘Frontios’?

A: It’s quite strange when you get a script in the post, you read in over breakfast, you get to ‘Turlough is writing on the floor, screaming “Tractators! Tractators! Tractators!” He is frothing at the mouth’. Then you get to the studio, and the production manager says ‘Okay Mark, this is the scene where you froth at the mouth’, you go ‘Okay’, you get on the floor, you writhe, you froth at the mouth. I did this, thought it was rather good, I’d given it my all. John came over and said ‘Mark, that was fantastic, but you spat on the camera lens’!

Q: ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’ must have had higher production values?

A: I loved working with the Daleks, they were fantastic. What happens is, first day of rehearsal they ring up whoever plays the Daleks, and the six old guys, they ring up and say ‘Is that Dalek 2, could you be at the rehearsal room in North Acton next week?’. They sit in wheelchairs, then you get on location, they put the Dalek on them, and they frighten you! I was frightened. The Daleks are great because, unlike any other monsters, they can move fast, they can go where they want to. Also, the actor in the Dalek doesn’t have to think about the voice. You can actually interact with the Daleks, and I think that was unique among the monsters.

Q: Janet left in that story. Did you know you were going to leave?

A: I think so. I think I made the wrong decision. After I left, they went through a period of longer stories, and with that Turlough would have had a chance. I think the combination of Nicola, Colin and Turlough could have worked. With Colin, they’d taken on board the fact that they needed more humour. I think it was time for Janet to leave, it was time for her to move on. I agreed with her that she should leave. I don’t remember her saying to me whether or not I should or should not, I think Peter probably agreed with me.

Q: You went to Lanzarote for ‘Planet of Fire’.

A: The only joy of foreign filming, it’s a nightmare, you work from the moment you step off the plane to the moment you get on it, the only joy – we had to get up so early, you know that story about Germans putting towels on all the deckchairs? We were up so early the first day, we managed to put towels on all the seats round the swimming pool and I wish I’d been there at five in the morning when the two Germans came down, and nobody sat on those towels all day round.

Q: And you had to carry Nicola Bryant out of the sea?

Whoever did the recce, I think stood on the beach and thought ‘Lovely sea, lovely sky’, but unfortunately what you can’t see is that the shore was incredibly sharp with rocks. So it was like trying to carry a beautifully proportioned but not feather-light row of needles. I just couldn’t do it. I kept stumbling. There’s a nudist beach just round from where we were filming, so Nicola’s out there in the water, screaming, this chap runs across the sharp rocks, dives in and tries to save her. I’ve just arrived at Nicola and I’m trying to explain that we’re making a film, and there’s this totally naked German guy wrapping himself around Nicola, trying to save her.

Q: What did you think of what came up in that story about Turlough’s origins?

A: Pretty desperate, wasn’t it? It worked. Just. But I’m sure the White Guardian was supposed to come back, but he didn’t.

Q: Were you sad to leave?

A: Yes, I was. I felt it had been a very nice part of my life, I’d made very good friends.

First a question: for a story about Russian werewolves set in Brazil, why is the title of the story neither Russian or Portuguese, but French?

The story: a werewolf is seen by the Doctor chasing a train, and he and Turlough set off to warn the passengers; only this train is no ordinary passenger train, it holds secrets of its own. In what is a very simple story, Marc Platt, who wrote the Sylvester McCoy TV story Ghost Light (the first Who story I remember consciously sitting down to watch, interestingly), allows the characters to shine through. Dodgy accents aside (and nowhere near as bad as they have been), the characters are played by some familiar names: Eleanor Bron and Burt Kwouk (Cato in The Pink Panther). The first part, set in Rio, has some wonderful moments of light humour and chilling menace. You can sense Rio, the sense of carnival. The second part, set entirely on the train, uses its confined location brilliantly. I felt the story lost its way in the third part a little, especially with the foregrounding of yet another Buffy The Vampire Slayer clone (two in two stories indicates how influential that show was in 2001), but the final part, as Rio is being destroyed by the werewolves, became epic with only some cod-mythology at the end mitigating its strength.

Loups-Garoux reveals the strengths of Big Finish’s approach to Doctor Who. Great production, great script, great actors – it all comes together here. It may not be my favourite of the series so far, but it certainly is an exciting nerve-pounding story with a great many little nods and winks to Little Red Riding Hood that I thought would be grating but were not. Mark Strickson was great as Turlough, but not the same as he was in the TV series somehow. More mature, perhaps.

For the uninitiated, Loups-Garoux is a great place to start.

The second of Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio plays and the first to focus on just one Doctor, in this instance Peter Davison’s Fifth.

It is London, 1702, and people are vanishing at the Diablo Club after losing at cards to Sir Nikolas Valentine. The Doctor, ever sensitive to danger, begins to investigate. The recreation of the Diablo and eighteenth century London is simply quite wonderful; the enclosed setting immediately provides atmosphere, a black menace. The performances are, for the most part, up to the task. If there is a criticism it is that everything here is perhaps a little too obvious: Valentine is quite clearly the sneering villain, it is clear who will die. But perhaps that is the point, for by making such things obvious one can sit back and listen to the adventure, to the mood, to the sense of place, and enjoy a romp of a story being well told.

To the uninitiated listener, those for whom Doctor Who is only a casual fling, this audio adventure is easily enjoyable. It is not overloaded with jargon, and its moves along at such a pace and with such obvious fun that sometimes you can even forget you’re listening to science-fiction.

Phantasmagoria is written by Mark Gatiss, a well-known member of The League of Gentlemen, and an outstanding writer. His love for Doctor Who shines through in what is a marked improvement from The Sirens of Time.