Tony Fyler
has worms. May need a pill to sort him out.
Or a Tequila
Slammer, that works too.
Apparently.
We
saw in Series 9 of Doctor Who how found footage can be used on screen to
create… well, something, anyway. The Wormery takes us into a kind of audio
version of the same technique, but with notably more success: an old Scottish
lady is talking to a man who’s interested in some spools of reel-to-reel tape
she has, recordings of her time and the conversations she overheard while
working as a hostess in Bianca’s, an exclusive nightclub in World War II
Berlin. When the Sixth Doctor drops in to hear the owner-chanteusse sing her
famous midnight songs, he’s aghast to find an old…friend there before him. Iris
Wildthyme, the peripatetic temporal adventuress (as played by the force of
nature that is Katy Manning, rather less conspicuously than usual – at several
points here you might wonder if this version of Iris actually is played
by Manning, her characterization is so immersive), is in Bianca’s, looking a
sight, being a pain and knocking back tequila like it’s going out of fashion
(which to be fair, in war-torn Berlin, it probably was). Through spool after
spool of tape, with occasional convenient narrative leaps from the woman, we
get to listen in on a night out with Iris and the Doctor.
What
unfolds from this premise is a sharp, intoxicating cocktail of worms and
weirdness, as it turns out Bianca’s isn’t quite what people think it is. There
are plots and sub-plots; Bianca has an agenda that can’t be guessed at, but
which owes something to another Sixth Doctor story, this one on-screen, with
her increasingly irritable manager Henry hatching slither-brained schemes of
his own and Iris introducing the idea of paralytic karaoke to Western Europe a
few decades early. Two cataclysmic physicists who, to say the least, aren’t
from round here add an air of mystery, and there’s a sense of Bianca’s having
escaped from an episode of Sapphire and Steel, especially when its true nature
and purpose is revealed. As Iris drinks not so much to forget as to focus, the
Doctor finds himself succumbing not only to the house special, but to the
charms of Bianca. Could she really be the companion to end all companions, the
one to sway the Time Lord who once wrote a paper on the precise chemical and
neurological equation of love, and steal his celibate hearts?
Or
is that just the alcohol talking? Whispering, sibilant in his head?
The
worms of the title are an oddly cerebral idea in among all the karaoke, tequila
and slurring talk of love. They’re largely kept on the periphery of events, a
kind of nebulous atom bomb threat ringing the rim of the adventure while the
characters get increasingly drunk and deadly, though they do represent the
fundamental duality of Doctor Who – change or stasis, good or evil, stability
or chaos. That duality is resolved with a surprising ease about three quarters
of the way through the story, by which point it has ceased to be our primary
concern in any case, if it ever was. By the time the worms stop being a worry,
we’re more fascinated by the character dynamics – why does Bianca have one of
Iris’ old dressing rooms at the club? Why does she have some of her old
clothes? And why does she seem to have such a deep connection to the Doctor?
Could it be that they have a history that neither Iris nor the Sixth Doctor
himself can yet guess at?
The
story, by Stephen Cole and Paul Magrs, exists simultaneously on several levels,
and there’s every chance if you try to follow the high-falutin’ ‘weird science’
plotline, you’ll tie yourself in knots of vermicelli before you’re halfway
through The Wormery. To be honest though, as is frequently the case in stories
which bear Magrs’ imprint, it’s the characters you really invest in and that
really deliver the drama you’re looking for. Jane McFarlane as Mickey, the
Scottish hostess, is likeable in both her old lady guide and as a young woman,
Manning’s Iris Wildthyme continues to be delicious – she’s an incorrigible
nightmare if you have to mop up after her, but arguably the same could be said
about the Doctor, and there’s a line here that bears a direct link to the
Doctor’s approach to what he does – “I am always serious about what I do, though
not always about the way I do it,” which makes us think it really could be Iris
that the Doctor is ultimately destined to travel through life with. It would be
interesting to hear her with a less fundamentally upright and morally
straightforward Doctor (Number Ten might be especially combustible – Big
Finish, just saying…Tennant and Manning, maybe?) The point is, long before the
multi-coloured Doctor arrived in Bianca’s, blundering into adventure in his
usual haphazard manner, Iris Wildthyme was on the case of something deeply
fishy going on in the nightclub, for which the worms are little more than bait.
Meanwhile, Bianca, played by Maria McErlane (star of many shows, but
identifiable in this format to a whole generation as the narrator of
EuroTrash), delivers a glorious counterweight to Manning’s Wildthyme, acting
almost as the Anti-Iris, particularly inasmuch as Wildthyme announces that she
fancies all the other Doctors, but not so much the Sixth incarnation, while
it’s precisely that incarnation – loquacious, philosophical, morally upright –
that interests Bianca. Hearing the two women almost scratch each other’s eyes
out over the Doctor is rather joyous, and when Bianca reveals her actual plans
and her connection to the Doctor, there’s a moment that’ll catch your breath as
you realise the scale of what you’re hearing.
Overall,
The Wormery is fun. Fun with a high ballsiness content to attempt, let alone
pull off, the storyline it delivers, and some great performances, particularly
from Manning, McErlane and Baker up front. The business of the worms themselves
is complex and you may have to hold your head perfectly steady to stop your
brains leaking out of your ears if you try and make such a mundane thing as
sense out of it, but get down and dirty with the characters and it will repay your
investment time after time.
No comments:
Post a Comment