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You Drive Me Crazy.

9/4/2019

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Doctor Who: Axis of Insanity. 2004.


This is another in the series of KO-FI sponsored posts, this one by Charles Murphy, who has asked me to talk about the Simon Furman written Doctor Who audio.

2004 was an odd time for the Big Finish Who audios. The preceding anniversary year had been tremendously exciting, with all sorts of experimentation and format breaking across the range that made for one of the best regarded in the now 20 year history of their output. Not everything worked (hello Nekromanteia), but the run from Jubilee (later adapted into the Christopher Eccleston Dalek episode) to the rather damp squib of the official 40th anniversary story Zagreus is rarely less than interesting.

For some reason though, almost immediately, 2004 became a rather poorly looked upon year. Partly because the return of the TV series was announced alongside the anniversary, perhaps taking some of the shine off the company for fans who had used it as a placebo. But the shift in actual quality is pretty sharp as well. Especially with so much of the year’s output being given over to the deeply unpopular Divergent Universe storyline.

Which is perhaps a bit of a shame for Furman that this was the one time he wound up writing for them. Especially as his audio, about the Fifth Doctor and companions becoming trapped in an alternate dimension of realities cut off by the Time Lords came out right after the first Divergent Universe four story season, where the Eighth Doctor and companions became trapped in an alternate dimension of realities cut off by the Time Lords.

Furman had of course written sporadically for the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, but had never gotten his feet under the table enough to create a sense that he was a natural fit for the franchise. He’d also, for all his experience as a writer and script editor, had worked exclusively in visual media, and audio requires a different set of mental disciplines.

So unfortunately Axis of Insanity feels like he didn’t have much help from script editor Gary Russell on adapting to a different style. This is most apparent from the fact Furman clearly didn’t know (despite claiming at the time in the DWM puff piece that Davison had been a childhood—hmm—favourite) didn’t have a sonic screwdriver and repeatedly wrote him as using one, with the one bit of editing done to simply rename the handy Swiss army knife with sonic powers he uses.

There’s also the problem that the central conceit—an insane collapsing reality full of surreal imagery not unlike the sort of thing the end of ReGeneration One would try for—is a great one for a comic, but not a great one for audio. The pictures may in theory be better on radio, but only if you have the right words, and here you have characters literally saying to people standing next to them “Tell me what you see”, and getting an awkward description that sounds like Alan Partridge trying to sell Monkey Tennis in response.

Because it’s easy to forget 2004 is a long time ago now, it was actually kind of a shock to revisit this for the first time in years and find how outdated a lot of the Big Finish format that was outside of Furman`s control now seems. In particular, aping the format and pacing of a 1970’s children’s show with four 25 minute episodes just a year before RTD showed you could do the same thing in 45 minutes makes it feel very creaky. The first episode especially spends a long time building up to the Jester character revealing they’re the villain who has taken over this hub controlling defunct timelines, something which is incredibly obvious from the first few minutes.

There’s also the issue of Erimem, the Doctor’s created by Big Finish Egyptian companion. Who is played by a white actress, with various cheats on the covers that featured her around this time verging on brown facing her. Not only that, she was consistently written as the most white British character possible, with a posh RP accent and refusal to use contractions (why is that the default when trying to write the “Other” in SF anyway?), making her occasional talk of being a vicious warrior queen seem entirely random. It’s a character that never really worked, and who does rather drag the whole thing down.


TV regulars Peter Davison and Nicola Bryant do better with their roles, with Peri particularly getting to be a nice strong effectively entirely new character in comparison to her usual portrayal on-screen.


For all the bells and whistles of the core idea, the story is entirely based around the guest performance of the Jester character. Who is almost literally written to be the Jack Nicholson Joker, a larger than life insane and unpredictable force of nature who warps the world around him.

Unfortunately they don’t have Jack Nicholson. They have Biggs Darklighter from Star Wars. Garrick Hagon is a reliably solid actor, but there’s a reason he’s most famous for nearly entirely being cut out of a film and all the attempts at witty wordplay somewhat fall flat and become annoying rather than entertaining. It’s something of a relief this turns out to be a false persona and they revert to a female, less OTT form for the last episode, even if (in another sign of how 2004 was a long time ago) the other characters struggle with pronouns in a way that would hopefully not be the case today.

The constraints of the cast size (and that, unlike his successor Nick Briggs, Garry Russell was not as keen on doubling up) means the rest of this intended insane upside down world is represented by a character who only exists to sacrifice themselves for the Doctor right at the end and a couple of extras. Again, making it hard to sell the scale.

All of which makes it sound rather awful. But it rattles along in an amiable enough way and could best be described as forgettable, but harmless. And the inherent issues are not really those of the author, but just the bad luck of when it was made. A year earlier, or a couple later, and Furman might have been better guided into this new field and had chance to do something a bit more interesting.

Which leaves the puzzle of why this was Furman’s only Who audio. It might not have been a great start, but he has all the hallmarks a company that relies on a small pool of regular writers looks for of being fast, reliable and someone who can generally be left to their own devices once they’ve been given a brief.

I suspect it’s simply that writing for a larger scale of production than a comic is a lot of hard work, and Big Finish famously don’t pay very well (and, unlike a lot of scripted drama, pay a one-off flat fee, no royalties). For an experienced TV writer and editor, it probably wasn’t worth the hassle of pursuing future opportunities. Leaving this as one odd little curio in his career that rather leaves you assuming that, no, he never really did get the hang of writing Doctor Who.


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Pickled In Time: The Eighth Doctor and the Wilderness Years.

5/2/2015

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My second video in less than a week (curse these Doctor's who don't hang around long enough), looks at the lengthy period when Doctor Who spent his brief screen-time snogging girls and hanging around Albert Square. Marvel at my inability to tell the difference between Comic Relief and Children in Need. No wonder YouTube just advised me my videos are shit. Huzzah!
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Survival of the Fittest: Big Finish Survivors Series 1 [No Spoilers]

9/6/2014

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The original Survivors, or at least the season he worked on it, is arguably Terry Nation’s masterpiece. As far as I can tell there was no equivalent to Chris Boucher or David Whitaker ridding his back to make the scripts good (or in some cases just flat out rewriting them), it’s his pure undiluted talent and shows that he was capable of so much more than, to pick an example of a Doctor Who story he wrote about the same time, The Android Invasion would ever suggest.

Sadly his falling out with Terrance Dudley and resulting walking away from the show at the end of its first year is something it never quite recovered from. There are some excellent episodes in the final two seasons, but also a lot of dull filler and it never again regained that strong sense of purpose Nation’s driving force originally gave it. The Fourth Horseman is quite easily one of the best TV pilots of all time.

So the current Big Finish revival had its work cut out, especially as it’s set alongside those early brilliant TV episodes. The first smart move made by the new team (led by producer David Richardson, director Ken Bentley and script editor Matt Fitton, who also kicks things off with the first script) is that the advantage of a disaster that affects the entire world is you’re not just limited to dealing with the characters of the series, you can show the fall of civilisation from multiple new perspectives.



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Doctor Who: 158 Wirrn Isle [Spoilers] 

18/5/2012

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Robert Holmes sells. According to Big Finish head honcho Nick Briggs pretty much anything containing something, however loosely, created by the former script editor during his run on the TV show will be guaranteed to sell better than the plays around it. Hence in 2012 alone we're getting, as well as the continuing solo adventures of Jago and Litefoot, returns for such diverse things as Nerva Beacon, the Sontarans, Magnus Greel (and Mr. Sin as well) and, in the final of this years Sixth Doctor trilogy, the nasty giant space insect Wirrn.

The story, by William Gallagher in his first four parter for the range, is something of an odd one. There's some good atmosphere and very nice ideas, but the dependence on technobabble and some fairly silly characters drag the thing off course before the end.



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Doctor Who: 157 The Fourth Wall [Big Finish Review, Spoilers]

16/5/2012

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After an extremely faltering start in The Curse of Davros new companion “Flip” really needed a strong second story to properly establish her character. Like Jonathan Morris last month author John Dorney is part of the Big Finish writers rep. Indeed, he also script edits for them, acts for them and no doubt writes and sings the theme tune. Oddly despite being a regular for them I've only previously encountered his one episode story Special Features on the 2010 anthology release.

However, The Fourth Wall, his first full story for the main range, happened to come out around the same time as a little spurt of work from him that wound up in my CD player, including a very good Lost Story for the fifth Doctor, a very good Lost Story for the forth Doctor and a decent in flawed historical for the Fourth Doctor Adventures. Anyone who posts on Gallifrey Base will have run across him in the audio sub forum as well, his posts, though not always ones I agree with, show someone who is clearly overflowing for enthusiasm for his work, and that clearly shows in most of his output. And unlike the otherwise usually equally excellent Morris he's much stronger at “Real” sounding characters, meaning Flip stood a much better chance of not being a one dimensional cipher this time round.



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Doctor Who 157: The Curse of Davros [Big Finish Review, Spoilers]

16/3/2012

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The real curse of Davros isn't, as this story suggests, the living hell he's endured trapped in his life support chair for centuries. It's that the character has been absent from Big Finish, the place where he's enjoyed his most consistent form of success in any medium, for four years (indeed, it's actually been seven years since he met a TV Doctor on audio).

The importance of Big Finish to the fan re-evaluation of Davros can't be understated. Before his first appearance in the range in the 2003 story imaginatively called Davros fans were generally very down on the character. Sure, he was great in Genesis of the Daleks, but then he was always there, never giving the Daleks a story to themselves, played by less good, more shouty and ranty actors. When Big Finish started doing Dalek stories the fact Davros wasn't involved was even something of a selling point.



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Doctor Who 2011 Subscriber Bonus: The Five Companions. [Big Finish Review, Spoilers]

28/1/2012

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_ As every trailer, podcast and bit of promotional blurb seems keen to remind us at every opportunity “Subscribers get more at Big Finish”. It's effectively the company's catchphrase, and the biggest bonus for subscribers every year is the traditional free story given out with the December release. Whilst these started out originally as fairly small scale things they've gotten bigger and bigger over the years, covering many of the old monsters (even the Krotons!) until last year's story went all out and gave all four (at the time) Big Finish Doctors together against the Daleks in the snappily titled The Four Doctors. Unsurprisingly, considering the need to balance four leads, a major monster and a complicated time travel plot on just one disc it was a story that didn't have very much room to breath and wound up a bit of a compressed mess.

But it obviously went down very well as 2011 sees the subscriber story get even bigger and more rammed full of characters and villains than ever before. The Five Companions is also packed with enough fan wank to drown Ian Levine with.


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Doctor Who: 155 Army of Death [Big Finish Review, Spoilers]

21/1/2012

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_ In keeping with the previous two plays in the Mary Shelley trilogy the conclusion to 2011's main range releases plays with horror tropes in an every so forced ironic “Look, it's Mary Shelley! The inventor of horror fiction! In a scary story!” way. By this time the skit is wearing a bit thin, but there's other problems with Jason Arnopp's script that make it a slightly underwhelming end to Mary's time in the Tardis (if that's what it is, more on that later...).

As with the Klein trilogy from two years ago the play is keen to emphasise that Mary and the Doctor have had other adventures than those we've seen, at least creating missing stories for the pair Big Finish can go back and visit later. But as with Klein, it means we end up being denied the new companion's first visit to another planet, which is something of a shame, especially as the new series has tended to make a Big Deal of this.


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Doctor Who: 154 The Witch From the Well. Big Finish Review [Spoilers].

16/1/2012

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_ Considering riffing on old horror films is a long and noble Doctor Who tradition it's actually surprising that up till now there's never been a proper Witchfinder General “homage”. The closest being Steve Lyons excellent The Witch Hunters novel back in 1999, but that deals very much with the real life history of the Salem trials rather than being evocative of Vincent Price and Ian Ogilvy. The November main range release sees author Rick Briggs (previously a winner of a competition to write a one part story for the 2010 anthology release) correct this regrettable oversight, coupling some good old fashioned “Get thee behind me Satan!” bodice ripping action with a centuries straddling time paradox. One of these plots works better than the other, but it still manages to be on balance a superior adventure for the 8th Doctor and Mary.


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Doctor Who: 153 The Silver Turk. Big Finish Review [Spoilers]

12/1/2012

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__ The October 2011 main range release is something of a landmark one. The first Paul McGann four part story since The Girl Who Never Was back in 2007, the first such release not to feature Charley Pollard, the first for a new companion and the launch of the first McGann “trilogy”. This effectively relaunches the 8th Doctor after several years in his own, separate series of CD's. It also sees the highly regarded Marc Platt write once more for the original Mondas Cybermen for the first time since he produced their origin story in Spare Parts, s a strong contender for the best Big Finish release of all time.

All this became something of a moot point however as pretty much everything anyone could talk about when it was released was the new arrangement of the theme tune. Intended to be evocative of the version used on McGann's one TV showing it sounds like the composer was having an epileptic fit over the keyboard and is the only version of the theme to date to make use of air guitar. I can't quite decide myself if it's delightfully bonkers or deeply irritating, but it has somewhat unfairly distracted from the story itself. Which is something of a shame as it's a good'un.



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