Tony finds home in all
the oddest places.
Though it began as a way
of getting new voices into the writing pool at Big Finish, and a way of taking
brave new angles on the Tardis teams we know and love, the Short Trips range has
become a quirky stalwart of the company’s output, adding massively to our
understanding and appreciation of the lives and personalities of our various
Doctors and companions.
A Small Semblance Of Home,
by Paul Phipps, takes us back to what feels like the earliest of early days,
with the original Tardis team – the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara. More than
that though, it takes us back to days when there was still a sense of absolute
division in the Tardis, an ‘Us and Them’ dynamic, with the spiky, cantankerous
Doctor not having yet softened towards his captive Earthlings, and they not
having entirely committed to the life of time travel but chafing against what
was essentially a kidnapping. Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford, was the uneasy
bridge between the two groups, while having plenty of issues of her own that
neither the Doctor nor the Earthlings could entirely understand.
It’s this black and white
early tension that Phipps and producer Lisa Bowerman conjure in this story. The
Doctor has been on an obsessive scientific treasure hunt for weeks now,
demanding regular help from the Earthlings but never deigning to let them in on
his plans. They just have to do as he says, because it’s his ship, and
therefore his rules, unless they want to find themselves marooned on the next
planet they come to.
Barbara is getting
increasingly fractious as she tries to keep hold of the Earthbound concept of
days to regulate her actions – when to eat, when to sleep and so on – refusing
to give in to the more temporally relative rhythms of life on board a time
machine. And Ian, always ready in the early days to challenge their
cantankerous old pilot, is being rubbed more and more raw by the Doctor’s
high-handed quest for a very particular plant.
Phipps captures that very
early sense of the teachers’ reluctance to be shipmates, of trying to impose a
Sixties British ‘normality’ on the vastness of time and space, and the initial
aloofness of the Doctor, feeling no compunction to have to explain himself to
the interlopers who forced their way on board his ship.
The thing about the
Hartnell incarnation of course was that he started out gruff, suspicious and
high-handed with the humans on his ship, and eventually grew more avuncular,
more fun and friendly, as he learned how to still live his life on his own
terms, but to include them as members of his surrogate family. A Small
Semblance Of Home is that story, condensed into a single incident. It’s the
Doctor, while still not noticing his own obsessive drives and mostly ignoring
the Earthlings and their seeming crankiness, working towards a thing he’s sure
will ultimately improve their lives and the atmosphere on board the Tardis.
While he finds it entirely superfluous to explain the reasons for his quest, there’s
something of the surprise birthday party planner about his actions, and you
make the journey of the story with the teachers – from affront and irritation,
through worry and weariness, to almost-despair at the difference between
themselves and their pilot…to an eventual reveal that makes you smile, that
could almost, were you in an especially soppy mood, convince you you have
something in your eye. Phipps, Bowerman and Ford take us on a rattling ride of
increasingly stretched nerves, only to end up serving us a treat, a resolution
that makes us smile, and makes us see the First Doctor in a new and warmer
light – the light with which, given so much hindsight, we’re familiar, but
which is efficiently driven from our mind throughout the story by its effective
drawing of the earlier, spikier Doctor.
A Small Semblance Of Home
is ultimately a thing of black and white First Doctor loveliness, though to
deliver its ending, it will drive you right back to the unpredictable early
days. Both of these are things that recommend it to the listener – go on, forgo
the cost of one Chai Latte, and have yourself A Small Semblance Of Home today.
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