Audio and radio plays

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”

Here we are again in the middle of another Big Finish trilogy. In City of Spires, the sixth Doctor returns to 18th century Scotland where he bumps into former travelling companion James Robert McCrimmon (aka Jamie), who has no recollection of the second Doctor, the TARDIS or anything else. More than that, Scottish history’s gone a bit weird: Edinburgh and Glasgow have been destroyed and replaced with what seems like an oil refinery. What could be happening?

Well, we never found out at the end of City of Spires. With The Wreck of the Titan, though, we’re starting to get a few clues.

Here, the Doctor and Jamie land on board the RMS Titanic, which is heading for an iceberg. Or should be. Except the moon’s all wrong, the crew aren’t the ones recorded by history, and most of the doors just lead to blank bulkheads.

More mysteries to solve. But will there be answers this time?

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 134 – The Wreck of the Titan”

As has become something of a tradition round here, I’m reviewing yet another of the Companion Chronicles out of sequence. But I have a good reason. You see this Companion Chronicle follows on directly from City of Spires and precedes Wreck of the Titan, so if I’m to avoid falling horribly behind again (and I already have a Lost Story, two more Companion Chronicles and Wreck of the Titan to get through, so I’m probably already there), I have to do it now.

Anyway, when last we left James Robert McCrimmon, he was heading off to a castle with the Sixth Doctor to find the TARDIS. And in this story, he finds it, together with a really ugly bloke and his pretty wife.

Brace yourself: it’s a dull one.

Continue reading “Review: The Companion Chronicles 4×11 – Night’s Black Agents”