A Day Not in the Life

Could The Beatles be swapped out in history for another band from Liverpool? Of course not and writer Eddie Robson has a lot of fun arguing that point with his 2013 Doctor Who audio play, Fanfare for the Common Men. Part of a series of audios recorded for Doctor Who's fiftieth anniversary, this one features the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and his companion, Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), travelling to 1963--the year Doctor Who premiered--to see The Beatles only to be disappointed when a trio called The Common Men emerge from the plane to thousands of screaming fans.

Robson is clearly a Beatles fan and well versed in Beatles trivia and he cleverly weaves the biographies of John, Paul, George, and Ringo into the lives of Mark (Mitch Benn), James (Andrew Knott), and Korky (David Dobson). Parts of the story are framed by interviews with The Common Men in later years in which they have conflicting memories of the Doctor or Nyssa turning up at clubs in Liverpool or Hamburg or stopping a strange armed man at the airport.

Several Beatles-ish songs are heard in the audio play and the Doctor wonders why whatever sinister force that took the Beatles out of the picture didn't bother to steal their great songs in the process. Harnessing the psychic power of a rabid fanbase seems to be part of the plan and the story ultimately makes the point that there's no substitute for the songs written with the real genius of The Beatles. Though the Doctor concedes The Common Men aren't bad.

The band were first mentioned in the first Doctor Who serial, An Unearthly Child. Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter, had been a fan. In Fanfare for the Common Men the Doctor remarks he never understood their appeal. The audio is filled with Beatles quotes but here Dobson allows the Doctor an appropriate Bob Dylan quote when he adds, "But I was so much older then."

The Incidental Nyssa Paradox

Following from 2013's Lady of Mercia, a Fifth Doctor audio that barely featured Nyssa, the also 2013 audio play Prisoners of Fate is all about Nyssa. Writer Jonathan Morris satisfyingly ties together several plot elements that had accumulated for the lady from Traken over the course of a variety of audio plays, offering some resolutions along with a starting point for some new ideas in a nice time paradox puzzle story.

When Janet Fielding came back to play Tegan, the makers of the audio plays naturally wanted to assemble the Fifth Doctor's (Peter Davision) best team of companions--Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), Tegan, and Turlough (Mark Strickson). The trouble was, any story featuring Turlough before Enlightenment had to include the subplot about him being in league with the Black Guardian, a story arc from Five's second season, and Nyssa had left the show in the story previous to Enlightenment. So in the audio Cobwebs, Nyssa was reunited with the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough after the events of Enlightenment. The makers of the audios also took the opportunity to age up Nyssa to something close to Sarah Sutton's actual age, featuring her decades later in the process of trying to find a cure for a disease called Richter's Syndrome.

The trouble with this was, in an earlier audio play, Winter, the Fifth Doctor had already encountered an older Nyssa who had not met up with him after Terminus. Winter had taken place inside the Fifth Doctor's mind while he was undergoing the regeneration seen in his final television serial, The Caves of Androzani. The Doctor and Nyssa essentially share a dream as part of his visions of previous companions and she tells him about her grown children and her life since she'd left the TARDIS. So when Nyssa rejoins the group in Cobwebs, she realises she can't tell the Doctor about her kids because the regenerating Fifth Doctor she'd encountered already didn't know about them yet.

Then people decided it was no fun having an older Nyssa around--and made things difficult because, since her voice sounded the same, it had to be explained somehow in every story that she looked older. So in The Emerald Tiger she finds a sort of fountain of youth and she's back to familiar television Nyssa, presumably enabling any casual listener to then pick up in the next story without needing to be filled in on why Nyssa's there and Turlough's not working for the Black Guardian.

But Jonathan Morris decided to turn all these convoluted band-aids and plot reroutings into a plus for a deliberately confusing paradox puzzle plot. So the group actually runs into one of Nyssa's kids, as an adult, on a planet where the rulers are able to see the future. To add to the confusion, Nyssa's son is named Adric (Alastair Mackenzie) and when he sees Nyssa on camera he assumes he's seeing her from earlier in her time stream, from before Terminus, before she left the Doctor. In his mind, she disappeared, presumed dead, when she left with the Doctor again in Cobwebs. The audio tries to confront the awkward truth that Nyssa, despite obtaining the cure for Richter's Syndrome, never returned home with it, choosing instead to wander with the Doctor. Both she and the Doctor try to explain this but no explanation ever quite holds water. I'm not sure what Morris could have done but I admire the effort.

Adric II is also working on the cure for Richter's Syndrome his mother never delivered so naturally the issue comes up. Parallel to this tangle is the one involving the oracle that allows the local authority to try criminals before they commit crimes. There's a nice courtroom scene where the Doctor points out the subjectivity in the premonitions the wordless oracle chooses to show--and of course this is borne out later in the story when we see them come true but in contexts that greatly modify the guilt.

There's the old fashioned, very understated, possibly romantic tension in this one between the Doctor and Nyssa and also between the Doctor and Tegan but it doesn't aspire to anything as blatant as some of the earlier stories. I always had the feeling that Tegan, on television, was sort of meant to be the possible romantic partner that never came close to coming off due to the number of companions Five usually had at once. The audios where it's just him and Nyssa travelling go a long way to take Five out of his "older brother" image into something like romantic chemistry, though it's never quite as overt as Four and Romana or Ten and all his companions. Maybe once all paradoxes are cleared away, then there'll be time for love.

Twitter Sonnet #1108

Horizons crowd with plastic figment trees.
The outer edge of hardened clouds condensed.
A question writ on stationed eyes was seized.
The song of tangled trumpets soon commenced.
A sturdy figure hauled the cable up.
A row of stars descends across the board.
Acclaimed in blue, at times we lately sup.
At silent docks the hulks are always moored.
An artist claims succeeding slides of brooks.
A creek could glitter red for peppers near.
The lamps along the bank were casting looks.
A darkened knot became the birch's deer.
At last, a synthesized recorder played.
The old electric bed was never made.

The Time Travel Budget Sink

At universities, subjects that fall under the humanities category--like history or literature--seem constantly threatened as schools find economic incentives to favour more measurably profitable things like business and engineering. Trust a Doctor Who audio play to posit that, in at least one case, it's because someone's trying to build a time machine in the physics department. Most of the first half of the 2013 Fifth Doctor audio play The Lady of Mercia deals with university politics as one history professor gears up to host a conference while students outside protest reduced funding for the humanities. It's an amusing concept played out well--the second half, occurring in the Dark Ages and centring on Æthelfrid, a character based on Æthelflæd, Queen of Mercia, feels a bit too much like a slightly embellished history lecture but it's entertaining enough.

Unsurprisingly, this audio was written by a university professor, Paul Magrs, who taught at Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of East Anglia--the stuff about university politics really feels like it comes from someone who lived in the midst of them, the Dark Ages stuff less so. Peter Davison, whose birthday was yesterday, Friday the 13th, the lucky fellow, is good as usual as the Fifth Doctor. He happily presents Tegan (Janet Fielding) as an Australian expert on tenth century Britain so they can get into the conference and there's some amusing business as Tegan bluffs her way through. She takes a much more prominent role in the Dark Ages section, something foreshadowed when the Doctor suggests that Æthelfrid could be a fitting feminist role model. Tegan has opportunity to talk with Æthelfrid (Rachel Atkins) about just how hard it is for a woman to rule in the Dark Ages.

The main plot kicks off when Tegan spots a professor stealing a sword that belonged to Æthelfrid--no-one else notices because, someone dryly remarks, academics are typically too busy getting drunk at conferences. The wife of the history professor is a physics professor who needs an ancient artefact, like the sword, as a catalyst for her time machine. Of course, nothing goes according to plan.

Also in the university scenes, there's an amusing thread featuring Turlough (Mark Strickson) who's snobbish about this school--and students who in turn look down on him, assuming he comes from Eton--"Brendon!" he corrects them. It's funny hearing him switch from being offended by people assuming he's human to being offended by people not knowing what school he went to.

Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) is also featured in this story but mainly only to prompt exposition by asking questions in dialogue, the default mode for a Doctor Who companion. All in all, a solid audio.

The Irrepressible Crystal

You can't keep a good crystal monster down. The 2013 Fifth Doctor audio play Eldrad Must Die is a sequel to the Fourth Doctor television story The Hand of Fear. Stephen Thorne reprises his role as Eldrad, the ancient and vengeful alien killer made of crystals. Featuring a really nice build up of tension and focus on Turlough, one of the Doctor's more interesting companions, this is an exceptionally good Fifth Doctor audio.

We catch up with the Doctor (Peter Davison), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), Tegan (Janet Fielding), and Turlough (Mark Strickson) on a little holiday on an oddly deserted beach. The Doctor and Tegan go out paddling while Nyssa and Turlough explore and there's a nicely gradual accumulation of menace as each person discovers one disturbing clue after another about the sand or the animals. When finally a woman named Kate (Jessica Claire) shows up in a panic with a Geiger counter it feels like the Doctor and his friends have made an innocent, foolish, and very dangerous mistake.

Later, the group runs into one of Turlough's classmates from the boarding school he was attending in his first television serial, Mawdryn Undead. It's a nice moment that gives a sense of Turlough's back story as something he lived in instead of just exposition. As with Nyssa, writers haven't wasted the opportunity to develop the potential of an underused television companion--though Nyssa was more sorely crying out for expansion. She contributes to this story, too, having an effectively tense encounter with a dolphin. Tegan also has some nice moments, I particularly liked one scene where she tries to draw the Doctor's attention from one crisis to another, a scene Peter Davison plays really well, a nice reminder that one of the Doctor's weaknesses is that he can't be everywhere at once. Though he might be in multiple places but that's another kettle of dolphins.

Twitter Sonnet #1101

We saw a silhouette in fishless night.
In second subs, the sea decides the door.
A wall reclines until it's tilted right.
At depths the crimson rocks began to pour.
The unexplainable absorbs a dress.
As moons descend the draper clutches dreams.
Sapphire ships and crimson boats redress.
Responses wait in isles 'neath the beams.
The carry weight reduced in zero clouds.
A distance blurs distinguished shapes of limbs.
In all the hats a smile turned the crowds.
Our lamp may darken now but never dims.
Returned to honey, golden strings could melt.
The ink but sinks again into the felt.