Doctor Who
Film
Radio
Canadian TV
US TV
In the UK: Saturday 17th April 2010, 6.15pm, BBC1
In the US: Saturday 1st May 2010, 9/8c, BBC America
Phew. Crisis over, again. Stevie’s back with 17 degrees of awesome to scare you, excite you and make you go, “Hang on, isn’t this just Aliens but with the Weeping Angels?”
Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 5×4 – The Time of Angels”
Odd though it seems, the late 1950s and early 60s was the prime time in TV history for intelligent sci-fi. America had The Twilight Zone, we’d already had all the Quatermass serials and various plays. Sci-fi was smart.
In fact, so smart was sci-fi that the Beeb turned to noted cosmologist Fred Hoyle and said, “How would you like to write us a TV show?” which he did. Surprisingly, it turned out to be pretty good.
A for Andromeda is now the kind of show that other shows and movies steal from. Look at Species. Look at Contact: they’re basically A for Andromeda at heart. The Earth gets a message from outer space that contains instructions on how to build a machine. With some reluctance, humanity does as it’s told and then begins to wonder if it was a good idea after all.
A for Andromeda‘s machine is a computer which then goes on to create life in the form of Julie Christie, who, it turns out, humanity really does need to worry about. Not much of the show survives, but what does remain is available on DVD. That still makes it a Lost Gem. Cue the weird old title sequence and one of the only remaining episodes.
As has been discussed before, Big Finish are in a dilemma with these Lost Stories. Just how authentic should they be to a half-finished script that never saw the blessed red of a script editor’s pen? Should they improve them or give the fans exactly what they want – a word-for-word identical version of the script as is, no matter what state it’s in?
In the case of MIssion to Magnus, they went with the wrong choice: they left it as was and served us all a great big pile of rubbish. But Magnus did have a virtually complete script. Paradise 5 is a different matter.
Written by He Who Must Be Hallowed, the creator of Sapphire and Steel PJ Hammond, Paradise 5 is an awkward lost story since it was originally intended for the The Trial of a Timelord season in the slot that ended up in Pip and Jane Half-Baked’s Terror of the Vervoids. It was going to have lots of Time Lords in it, lots of trial stuff and the companion was going to be Mel, as played by Bonnie Langford.
Big Finish couldn’t afford that. There was no way they were going to get Lynda Bellingham and Michael Jayston to reprise their roles, for one thing. Bonnie Langford’s stopped doing the Big Finish plays, now she’s having fun dancing – and proved her point that it wasn’t her, it was the writing of Mel that was the problem.
So they stripped out all the Time Lord stuff from what there was of PJ Hammond’s scripts, which left just three episodes. PJ Hammond wasn’t free to adapt the rest of the story into an audio play, so they got Andy Lane to write an intro episode, convert Mel to Peri – since Nicola Bryant was well up for some more Lost Stories – and polish it all up. He also ‘updated’ it so that it was less 80s, which he reckoned wouldn’t wash these days.
So given all of that, do we have a PJ Hammond Lost Story now or simply a shiny new sixth Doctor and Peri story that’s a bit PJ Hammond-esque in places?
Discuss.
Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – The Lost Stories – 05 – Paradise 5”
It’s almost like a new series of Doctor Who has started with a hot new companion. Don’t ask about number 15.
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