A Babble of Inhuman Voices

 Last weekend, I was down in Glasgow for my mother's birthday. The journey back to the North-East by train took six hours on Sunday. There was a detour over the Forth Bridge and through Fife which was novel; fortunately,  I had some Dr. Who material to pass the time:

The Selachian Gambit is one of Big Finish's Companion Chronicles, read by Anneke Wills and Frazer Hines.  Ben and Polly  first encountered the cyborg sharks in the 1997 BBC book The Murder Game. Here, their creator Steve Lyons has them implicated in a robbery of the Galacti-Bank, just after Jamie comes aboard the Tardis.
Although the actors give spirited and likeable readings, the fact is this feels too contemporary an idea to conceivably work as a slice of Sixties Who. Hostage negotiators, I feel, would be as unthinkable in 1967 as sub-prime mortgages or Waitrose mustard ice cream (other supermarkets are available). The Selachians aren't particularly interesting monsters either although at least they're not off the telly for a change. Two out of five Talmars.

After over a decade of intractability, Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor is ubiquitous on audio now. The Shada audiobook is a massive 11 hours and 30 minutes in duration. It's read over ten cds by Lalla Ward with John Leeson as K9, which lends an air of authenticity to this version.
Shada is of course the Lost Story by Douglas Adams, which would have been broadcast in January 1980, (when I was at Hamilton Grammar School) as the finale to the hugely popular Season 17. It was never completed due to industrial action. It's an adventure largely set in Cambridge, where a space villain steals a Gallifreyan book in order to find the lost prison planet of the Time Lords and liberate a "mind criminal".
I first heard of the story in Doctor Who Monthly shortly after the production had been cancelled. Therefore, I recognised elements of it when reading Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency in 1988. 

 
Almost ten years later,  I subsequently saw the  BBC video version, stitched together by John Nathan Turner ( with Christopher Neame's Skagra  in an outfit not unlike Bianca Jagger at Studio 54) and hosted by Tom Baker, lurching in and out of character as the Fourth Doctor.

Big Finish was commissioned to rework Shada as an animated webcast for BBCi in 2003. This production starred Paul McGann as the Doctor and Lalla Ward returned as President Romana. It had pace and humour and in those pre-RTD days, the weekly online episodes were almost like Doctor Who on telly again.

Virtually a decade on, Lalla reads Gareth Roberts' new  novelisation of Shada with great charm and style -even Roberts' more camp interpolations, such as Skagra learning Earth idioms from Clarence on The Dick Emery Show.  Just because it got a bit wearing around disc eight, and because AudioGo's sound effect for the Tardis interior is utterly wrong,  I'm awarding the audiobook four out of five Talmars.


 I've often felt that the prevailing idea that the face of UK culture neatly changes every decade was lazy and inaccurate, largely a consensus developed from Channel 4 clipshows. Dominic Sandbrook's BBC series The 70s handwaved my formative decade into cliché with leaden irony over the last three weeks. There's a potential drinking game in counting the number of times the arch Sandbrook (who wasn't even born in the 70s) intoned in his stripey man-scarf "...and nothing would EVER be the same again." 
I prefer the Long Decade theory. I've often thought the Eighties -as they've been repackaged in our bullet-point era- didn't begin until Live Aid and ended with Tony Blair in Number 10. Similarly, it might be helpful to think of 1971 as Nineteen Sixty-Eleven. 

The Daemons is a perfectly-preserved slice of wiggy early 70s with dippy hippy Jo Grant as the audience POV character at the heart of "Doctor Who and the Wicker Devil Rides Out." The Dennis Wheatley roadshow rolls into Archers country but the story might be less about the occult and more about sophisticated city folk's experience of the unsettling oddness of isolated rural people ( which I can vouch for). Despite the Satanic overtones, this serial is a sunny, summery joy. Everyone is adorable, even huffy Pertwee, although Roger Delgado's suave and charming Master is probably the star. Producer Barry Letts' two sons speak very movingly about their father and his work in one of the extra features. Five out of five Talmars.


Coming soon: Deadman and the Spectre and Earth-23?


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