Big Finish

The intention behind the Big Finish ‘Lost Stories’ range is to dramatise scripts that were intended to be made as Doctor Who stories back in the day, but never quite made it. Compared to many in the range, Ingrid Pitt and Tony Rudlin’s The Macros does at least have ‘namecheck’ quality – at least some people had heard of it before Big Finish decided to make it.

But it also had another namecheck quality – it was the brainchild of Hammer Horror/The Time Monster/Warriors of the Deep actress Ingrid Pitt and her husband Tony Rudlin, who had heard about ‘The Philadelphia Experiment‘, a conspiracy theory (and naff movie) that suggested that during the second world war, experiments in invisibility performed by the US Navy on the USS Eldridge led to the ship becoming detached from space and time.

The story – originally The Macro Men – has ended up rewritten a lot, both while it was being targeted at the TV show and while it was being lined up for Big Finish. Not a problem you might think. But for those of you who don’t bother with computer backups, this is a salutary warning: Pitt and Rudlin’s computer hard drive broke and they lost the second episode. Then it broke again and they lost the first episode. So yes, genuinely lost and they’ve had to rewrite it from memory. So how exactly is this the script that was going to be on Doctor Who that so desperately needed to be made?

Oh well, it’s here anyway, quibbles aside, and after all that wait, I can honestly say, “Meh.”

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – The Lost Stories – 08 – The Macros”

Riddle me this: is a Lost Story actually lost if it was simply never accepted for production or has been through so many rewrites for so many Doctors that no one can truly say what was actually lost?

Pat Mills – a former Doctor Who Monthly comic strip writer best known now as the co-creator of Judge Dredd – came up with an idea for a comic strip. His then-wife said it was too good to be a comic and he should submit it to the TV show’s production team. So first he approached Christopher H Bidmead, script editor for Tom Baker’s last season. By the time Mills was ready to meet the producer, John Nathan Turner, Peter Davison had taken over as the Doctor and Eric Saward was the new script editor.

Somehow, time flew by, with changes requested here and there, and before you knew it, Colin Baker was the Doctor, the show became sillier again, and yet more rewrites were wanted. Except The Song of Megaptera never went into production, probably because it was set inside a mile-long space whale.

While working on an Eighth Doctor and Lucie story for Big Finish, Mills asked if BF would be interested in making the script at long last as part of its Lost Stories range, and BF said yes. Deciding – presumably for the sake of convenience – to make it a Sixth Doctor and Peri story like the rest of the range, Big Finish have let Mills rewrite it the way he wants for audio.

The result is a slightly Douglas Adams-ish bit of whimsy in which interstellar whalers are chasing after a space-whale – which the Doctor and Peri eventually end up inside. It isn’t bad, but is it Doctor Who?

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – The Lost Stories – 07 – The Song of Megaptera”