Doctor Who

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”