Tony’s in an Unbound
Dimension.
Here’s the thing.
People die.
Every day, they just keel
over and stop being. As the Doctor would say, that’s fine – everything has its
time, and everything dies. Even the people who, because they played a certain
role, have become immortal in our imaginations. We’ll die too, one day, and
they will go on being immortal in someone else’s imaginations, because – well,
because that’s what immortality means.
In the world of audio drama
though, you can be reborn as somebody else, and then, to some extent they’ll be
immortal too, for playing you, playing someone that people have taken to their
hearts. If you want to keep up your immortality, sooner or later that has to be
true, and that has to be OK.
Big Finish has, for
instance, recast Jon Pertwee as Tim Treloar, and now the Third Doctor, immortal
as he is because of Pertwee, is having new ideas through the body and the voice
of Treloar. And that’s fine. The company also frequently uses Frazer ‘Holy
gods, that’s uncanny’ Hines to play the Second Doctor, rather than the
annoyingly extinct Patrick Troughton, who made him famous. Elliot Chapman now
plays Michael Craze playing Ben Jackson, and both William Russell and Peter
Purves have got their different versions of William Hartnell’s First Doctor
down beautifully.
And that’s fine too.
I mention all this by way
of prelude to telling you I had no enthusiasm for this box set. None at all.
David Bradley’s a
fantastic actor, and playing William
Hartnell in An Adventure In Time And Space, I thought he was entirely
peerless. I wasn’t, however, in favour of his being written into the actual TV
Doctor Who as the First Doctor, because, to my mind he neither looked nor
sounded like the character when dressed in the get-up. Time however had passed
between An Adventure and Twice Upon A Time, and Bradley did enormously good
work on screen, winning me over to his interpretation of the First Doctor
(despite the occasionally heavy-handed writing which made the First Doctor out
to be more blatantly sexist than he ever was on screen).
And I still had absolutely no enthusiasm for this box set, because while
the other members of this Tardis crew (Jamie Glover as Ian, Jemma Powell as
Barbara, and Claudia Grant as Susan) are all fine actors in their own right,
their roles in An Adventure had been minimal, and they felt cast more as
lookalikes than especially as sound-alikes. So bringing them across to audio
felt like a visual cash-in without, necessarily, the vocal skills to support
it.
So – does it work? Could a
box set like this convert me?
Well, mostly yes…and a
little no.
There are two four-part
adventures in the first volume of The First Doctor Adventures – The Destination
Wars, which takes the crew to an alien world, and The Great White Hurricane,
which is a pure historical that drops our heroes into 19th century
New York and entangles them in the lives of the local gangs in the shadow of a
great big meteorological time bomb – a superstorm blizzard that is due to hit
the whole east coast.
The first thing to say is
that the writing is superb in both stories – Matt Fitton poses a great
philosophical question about whether the ends justify the means in The
Destination Wars, and Guy Adams gives us a pulse-pounder that works like a much
better version of The Day After Tomorrow in The Great White Hurricane. As might
be expected of these experienced hands, there’s barely a note wrong in either
of the stories, either in terms of delivering adventures with solid hooks,
engaging characters and proper dilemmas, or of evoking the period of the first
two years of Doctor Who on screen.
In Fitton’s story
particularly, the excitement is especially pulled along by the inclusion of
what is now the earliest audio version of the Master, played by James Dreyfus.
Yes, really, James Dreyfus, known to generations of Britcom-watchers as
Constable Goody in The Thin Blue Line, or as Tom Farrell in Gimme Gimme Gimme.
Known, possibly, to most Americans as the camp workmate of Hugh Grant in
Notting Hill. That James Dreyfus…is the Master.
Nails
it.
Totally, utterly, without
a moment’s hesitation, nails it. Sounds like nothing for which he’s best known,
but channels the darkness efficiently into a slightly pre-Delgado version still
very much on the side of dark sanity, rather than the increasingly demented
versions of Alex Macqueen or Michelle Gomez. James Dreyfus: you’ll believe a
voice can sound elegantly malignant.
The dilemma of The
Destination Wars taps into the sad historical reality that war is an
accelerator pedal for technological advancement, and brings the Tardis crew
into the lives of a family on a far-distant planet, as time passes and war is
brought, intentionally, to them. There’s a neat touch of proto-Salamander
underpinning the story, the Master as Enemy of An Entirely Different World,
playing both sides against the middle to boost their advancement for his own
unspeakable ends. Bradley and Dreyfus become a solidly antagonistic pair, more
bluntly adversarial than Pertwee and Delgado, Davison and Ainley, Tennant and
Simm or Capaldi and Gomez, and the dynamic of soured, embittered friendship
helps power the drama along.
The Great White Hurricane
fulfils its destiny as a pure historical by making the weather the big bad, and
separating our heroes early. Much of the story is a quest by each of them to
find the others and get back to the Tardis, which rings true to the period. The
adventures they have along the way, including internecine teen gang wars, a
mother in search of her stolen child, a frozen train full of stranded
passengers and a frozen river leading to some Titanic action and an
all-hands-on-deck effort to save lives are rich in characterization, meaning we
enjoy the time we spend in New York, while still feeling the imperative pull of
the weather that’s about to hit.
So – all good then?
Almost.
Bradley gets quite quickly
into the swing of the audio adventures, and you begin believing that he’s just
giving ‘another interpretation’ of the First Doctor you know and love. The rest
of the Tardis crew though deliver their characters with varying degrees of
success. Suffice it to say that in one case, the disparity between the
performance of the original on screen and the performance here in audio goes
beyond distracting and hits levels that disconnect the listener entirely from
the character being played. It rather detracts from the drama when characters
are put in peril if, whenever you hear them, you’re made to think ‘Who’s that
again? No, really?’, and that’s what happens on this box set, though it’s more
noticeable in The Great White Hurricane because in The Destination Wars, the
Bradley-Dreyfus double act and the philosophical meat of the story does much to
distract from that feeling of disconnection.
The stories are still
compelling, and Bradley leads a bold effort to reimagine the First Doctor and
his friends for the 21st century, allowing them to have new
adventures. I would like to have been entirely
wrong about the ‘lookalike, not sound-alike’ thing, and in forthcoming volumes,
they may well square the circle and bring the one particularly distracting
performance at least within a distance where with a hearty jump, the
imagination of the listener can convince itself the character at least is the
same, even if the person playing them is entirely different. In Volume 1,
though, I’m only mostly wrong.
Mostly wrong is absolutely
good enough to give this box set a whirl, incidentally. You can safely spend
your money on the basis of my being mostly wrong.
But here’s to a future in
which I’m increasingly, decidedly and thoroughly wrong.
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