Last Doctor Who Story you listened to?

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Cuthbert does reappear later on, with Romana II as the companion to Tom. So his story's definitely not over.

And yes, that was the main reason I appreciated this series with Tamm's Romana, because it made her Romana more rounded a personality and showed that she was really the same Romana as Lalla Ward's. I feel the same about the sort-of disconnect between the two Romana's, but they worked the bridge wonderfully. As they almost always do, BF.

 

[Christopher]

Out of all of those, I'd definitely recommend the Lost Stories for the First Doctor. Farewell Great Macedon may be narration style, but its still very evocative and feels very much like a '60's serial.

I just finished Farewell, Great Macedon, and the story is quite good, and does indeed fit the style of season 1 perfectly. It seems the adaptation didn't try to reconcile it with the later series but kept the early assumption that the Doctor and Susan were from humanity's distant future, as well as some other oddities like the Doctor saying he'd pursued a medical degree. The companions' debate over whether history can be changed also sort of feels like "The Aztecs" never happened. Barbara's conviction that history can't be changed would fit in well after that, but Ian acts as though the issue has never come up before.

The narration style was not easy to get used to, especially with the weird practice of delivering so many characters' lines as paraphrases (e.g. "He would see them later, he said" rather than "'I'll see you later,' he said") yet nonetheless performing them in character. That's just bizarre and distracting. Russell's First Doctor was often pretty good, in delivery if not in timbre, but it was sometimes hard to tell his Doctor from his Ian. Ford was better at differentiating Barbara and Susan, and captured Jacqueline Hill's tones rather well.

It's a good work of drama, but its take on Alexander the Great is rather hagiographic and it takes a lot of liberties with history. I've been reviewing my old history texts and Wikipedia to put it in context. Apparently historians tended to see Alexander as a drunken thug and a tyrant until a historian named W.W. Tarn came along in the 1930s-40s and popularized a revisionist view that painted him as a virtual saint dedicated to the Brotherhood of Man. That was clearly the basis for ATG's portrayal here. Modern historiography tends to land somewhere between the two extremes.

They also compressed the timing a great deal. All three of Alexander's close friends who were murdered by the conspirators were real people who died more or less as depicted, but Cleitus was killed 5 years before Alexander, Hephaestion 8 months before, and Calanus several months before, none of them in Babylon. Also, there was a real theory that Antipater poisoned Alexander, but it's been largely discredited as an attempt to smear his descendants. The story also painted Iollas as a priest and co-conspirator of Antipater, but he was actually Antipater's son (which I guess would make him Anti) and Alexander's wine pourer.

Also, the story portrays Ptolemy as a "Nubian," along with an unfortunate Magical Negro portrayal of him as a loyal and stoic servant of Alexander, but the real Ptolemy Soter looked more like Chief O'Brien.

If there's a documentary feature, I haven't listened to it yet. I hope they talk about the adaptation and how much was in the original story. If Ptolemy was originally written as black, that might've created some problems with Hartnell, unfortunately.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Largely agree with your take. As a fan of Oliver Stone's Alexander, which tries to reconcile Alexander's drunkedness and violent tendencies with his kindness and forward thinking*, this one did seem to portray Alexander as Marco Polo 2.0. Which is fine, I guess, given this is Doctor Who and not actual history, but it can more distressing if you don't go about it like I (cynically one might say, though I do ascribe so myself) do. It works for a condensed, introductory piece of fiction for what really happened, IMO. Also, its John Dorney acting as Alexander, so its all good.

As for continuity, that did niggle me, the way they could have easily and flexibly allowed for the story to still fit just after The Aztecs. As is, you have to assume Ian just forgot about that trip or the Time War affected them all somehow, lol. In any case, does your listening The Fragrance? I think its a single episode that was also meant to be filmed, but I've not listened to it. Apparently is well appreciated. Also, does that mean you can move forward to Eighth's Lucie Miller seasons?

*SImiarly, that film also portrays Ptolemy closer to how he was in real life, Anthony Hopkins himself actually playing him in his old age.

 

[Christopher]

In any case, does your listening The Fragrance? I think its a single episode that was also meant to be filmed, but I've not listened to it. Apparently is well appreciated.

Haven't gotten there yet.

Also, does that mean you can move forward to Eighth's Lucie Miller seasons?

I borrowed the Second Doctor Box Set too, so that would be next, though I'm more wary of that one. And I remembered that Hoopla has the first season of the First Doctor Early Adventures, which I might try before 8DA, though I might hold off if I get tired of narrated stories.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Haven't listened to the Early Adventures. Like, I'm pretty wary of the narrated adventures, though some are worth the effort. But, given the wealth of full cast stories out there, it doesn't seem worth the effort to me.

 

[Christopher]

Haven't listened to the Early Adventures. Like, I'm pretty wary of the narrated adventures, though some are worth the effort. But, given the wealth of full cast stories out there, it doesn't seem worth the effort to me.

I'm getting close to the point where I don't have much else to choose from on Hoopla. After 8DA, the longest remaining series available will be The Companion Chronicles and Short Trips.

 

[Christopher]

The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance: Man, the title is almost as long as the episode. Not much of an episode, and a reminder that some stories are unmade for a reason. Conceptually weird and overly talky, and ultimately not very substantial, with the protagonists not actually doing anything except listening, reacting, and leaving.

The documentary bits were less than I'd hoped. I wondered if they'd go into the historical liberties the story took and put it in context, but instead they just claimed, incorrectly, that everything in Macedon happened just as it did in the story. And they barely discussed TFYAoF at all.

Anyway, I read the wiki's entry on The Early Adventures, and it sounds like they're closer to full-cast stories than these are, with some narration but mainly just with the companion actors doubling as the Doctor and Barbara. Should be worth a try. Hoopla only has the first four anyway.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

For my First Doctor fix, I simply go to the recast First Doctor Adventures. They take a bit to get used to, but I definitely enjoy them as they sound authentic and of the era, and some of the stories are rather excellent, too.

 

[JD]

Thanks to the mini-documentary, I now know how Alice Krige pronounces her surname. It's "kree-guh," not "kreeg" or "kreezh" as I thought it might be. All these years, and I never knew that.

Wow, I've been pronouncing it wrong all this time, I've been saying it Kreeg.

 

[Christopher]

Prison in Space: Egad, why did they make this? It's one thing to adapt unmade stories that could've actually been impressive or worthwhile, like Farewell, Great Macedon or The Foe from the Future. But this is a silly, sexist exercise that deserved to remain unmade. It's overly broad and cartoonish, the gender attitudes and accompanying humor are an embarrassment by modern standards, and it's too predictable to be interesting. The idea of a Doctor Who story about a space prison had potential, but this was not the story to build around it. Even if it had been made at the time, it would probably be looked back on with a roll of the eyes today.

Fraser Hines's Second Doctor is not as good as I'd hoped. It's too limited an impression -- it captures one or two aspects of Troughton's delivery quite well, but overdoes them and uses them to the exclusion of other parts of his range. And Hines has an -- oddly -- staccato -- way of delivering his narration that -- gets pretty -- distracting, and that intrudes on his Doctor performance. Though he doesn't do that as Jamie, oddly enough.

I will admit, though, that I enjoyed the mental image of Zoe and a bevy of lovely female guest stars in tight black rubber catsuits...

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Yeah, that's basically the consensus on that story. Never gonna listen to it, basically.

Personally, I've been deep into the audio/tv marathon, and I actually decided, since it seemed to fit, to slot Torchwood in. So I experienced the first two seasons of Torchwood with the audios to correspond to them at the time, and I will say this. Season 1 is very, very meh, but the audios are overall the better part of that series. Love the Committee as the villainous Illuminati-esque organization. Series 2 was a major step up, and the audios were fine, but the TV episodes were largely the better half here. So now I've the rest of Torchwood to experience.

Who-wise, I've just finished the Doctor-Donna audios, including the recent Donna Noble, Kidnapped! set, which was... alright? The middle stories are very forgettable, the first and last easily the most fun. The rest of the audios were all solid, never bad really, but I would say only Death and the Queen and No Place stand out and with good reason. But I would eat anything with that TARDIS team, as I think they are always so entertaining that I could muster interesting in even the most meandering of stories (The Doctor's Daughter for example). I would love to see more of them made.

 

[Christopher]

The Destroyers: Terry Nation's pilot for a Dalek series didn't impress me much. The lead characters were a lot more ordinary and less interesting than the Doctor, and the Mark Seven android character was too much of a stock sci-fi character type. I wonder if part of the reason ABC rejected the pilot when Nation pitched it to them in 1967 was because Mark was too much like Spock.

It's weird that the second story on The Second Doctor Box Set is a Doctor-less spinoff of a First Doctor story. Or more of a reboot, actually, since the version of Sara Kingdom in this is a lot different from the hardened, unemotional security officer of "Masterplan." Although I gather the audio version flipped the roles of Sara and her brother David, so I guess the show Nation envisioned would've had Sara as the Dalek prisoner that lead character David was trying to find and rescue -- making her even more different.

Is there any way this could take place in Sara's past, before she became so hardened? I doubt it, since IIRC, the Daleks' titular invasion masterplan came as a surprise to humanity.

Anyway, the approach to the narration was interesting. I haven't listened to the documentary bit yet, but it sounded like Jean Marsh was reciting the actual stage directions from the pilot script, though I don't know if Nation would've written his script directions in such a flowery and dramatic way.

 

[Christopher]

I've started on The Early Adventures, the single season that Hoopla has. Domain of the Voord was pretty good, fleshing out the Voord in an interesting way. In some ways it's different than a First Doctor TV adventure would be, much larger in scope and darker in some ways, but it's also very true to the era, such as telling a long story that keeps the travelers in one place for months, and even having the Doctor and Barbara "on vacation" for a couple of episodes to minimize the doubling up Russell and Ford had to do.

Oddly, Russell's and Ford's impersonations of the Doctor and Barbara aren't as good as they were in the Box Set, even though this is four years after that. But it is good that it's basically a normal full-cast adventure aside from them doubling up, although it still has descriptive narration. I think I like that combination.

 

[Christopher]

The Doctor's Tale was pretty good, a pure historical involving the travelers with Geoffrey Chaucer and the overthrow of King Richard II by Henry IV. It captured the feel of a First Doctor historical pretty well and had some effective character business. And it seems to have been quite well-researched and largely historically accurate, involving lots of real people and events. I think they may have compressed the time frame of some events, though not as drastically as Farewell, Great Macedon did. And I'm not sure, but I think they may have glossed over the fact that Richard II's wife Isabella was only 9 years old at the time of the story's events. She did act rather childish, but not knowing the history until after, I came away with the impression that she was only a little younger than Vicki, and acted immature because she was a pampered royal. Also, the actress's voice wasn't high enough to be convincing as a 9-year-old. But it does explain why even contemporary characters from c. 1400 thought she was too young to be married, given that teenage marriages were pretty common back then. (Romeo and Juliet were, what, 17 and 14?)

This is the second one in a row that arranged to have the Doctor and Barbara absent for most of the middle two episodes, so the actors wouldn't have to double up all the way through. I wonder if they're all like that. Anyway, the remaining two are post-Barbara, so only the Doctor needs to be doubled. I hope Peter Purves's Hartnell impression is better than William Russell's was on these two. I did get used to his interpretation Doctor over time, but it's still not that close to Hartnell.

 

[Christopher]

I really enjoyed The Bounty of Ceres. It's probably the most realistic, hard science fiction story I've ever come across in Doctor Who, so it's right in my wheelhouse. It had lots of very imaginative, clever, science-literate ideas, even if not all of them turned out to be true in-story. It also took marvelous advantage of the audio format to do a story set in a low-gravity environment, and made good use of Steven's astronaut backstory in a way the TV series virtually never did.

Although the science wasn't totally perfect. It made the usual mistake of depicting decompression as a prolonged, powerful wind rather than a single near-instantaneous event like a balloon bursting (hence "explosive decompression"). And there were a couple of sound-editing mistakes where people stunned in Ceres's .029g hit the ground with a loud thud instantly thereafter instead of taking several seconds to drift down.

Another clever bit was the idea that the Doctor used the dimensional thingy he stole from the Meddling Monk to change the fairly small TARDIS interior we saw in the early seasons into the endless maze depicted later on. The problem is that it's hard to reconcile with the Target novelization of The Edge of Destruction, which fleshes out the 2-parter with an extended exploration of the vast interior of the TARDIS, a couple of seasons earlier in the chronology than this.

This is the first one that feels like a modern story rather than one written in the '60s. It's based on the modern scientific understanding of Ceres as an icy dwarf planet, and it references ideas from later series continuity like the ginormous TARDIS wardrobe and the idea of the Doctor as an alien with anomalous life readings (the Hartnell era seemed to operate under the assumption that he and Susan were humans from a far-future Earth colony world, or at least was compatible with that interpretation).

Peter Purves's First Doctor isn't as good as William Russell's, though it was adequate. He admitted in the behind-the-scenes segment that he wasn't really trying for an exact recreation.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Really glad you're enjoying these. I've always been apprehensive of the format of the stories, but if they're that good I seem to be missing out.

That said, I have listened to a couple, including The Daughter of the Gods which is also my first exposure to Purves' First Doctor, and having listening to it after the First Doctor Adventures with Bradley as the First Doctor... doesn't Purves' interpretation sound a lot like Bradley? At least it does to me.

Now, if you want some Second Doctor fix on audio, for free, you could check out the fan-made ones by Christopher Thomson. I know how that sounds, but they're very well made - so much so, that the sound engineer in them was hired by Big Finish after they were released! Check them out at https://chriswalkerthomson.com/dwthemissingadventures/

You might just like them, too.

 

[Christopher]

Really glad you're enjoying these. I've always been apprehensive of the format of the stories, but if they're that good I seem to be missing out.

They strike a good balance between full-cast and narration. The narration is mainly for describing visuals and action, which helps fill in the gaps that the non-narrated audios often have. Otherwise it's mainly just to specify which of the two characters is speaking when the actors are doubling up. And it almost never does the weird thing Macedon did where they delivered paraphrased dialog in the third person but performed it as though the character was speaking.

doesn't Purves' interpretation sound a lot like Bradley? At least it does to me.

Not to me. My recollection is that Bradley does a fairly good job conveying Hartnell's speech rhythms and mannerisms, but has a substantially lower-pitched, more gravelly voice that isn't a very good match at all. I'd say the opposite is true of Purves -- the pitch and timbre are closer (though not as close as Russell came in Macedon) but the delivery is less faithful.

Honestly, I wish they'd set aside their sentimental concerns about recasting and just gone with John Guilor as the First Doctor. He was amazingly accurate in the extended DVD edit of "Planet of Giants." There were times when I could hardly tell it wasn't the real thing.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Not to me. My recollection is that Bradley does a fairly good job conveying Hartnell's speech rhythms and mannerisms, but has a substantially lower-pitched, more gravelly voice that isn't a very good match at all. I'd say the opposite is true of Purves -- the pitch and timbre are closer (though not as close as Russell came in Macedon) but the delivery is less faithful.

I see. Wonder what you'll think of Bradley audio delivery as I find that very akin to Purves', certainly as far as the one Early Adventure I'd experienced.

Honestly, I wish they'd set aside their sentimental concerns about recasting and just gone with John Guilor as the First Doctor. He was amazingly accurate in the extended DVD edit of "Planet of Giants." There were times when I could hardly tell it wasn't the real thing.

On the one hand, it makes a lot of sense to use Guilor, as he'd already acted the part out on an existing story's recreation of another lost episode. So he's been tested, so to speak. But BF at the time didn't do recasts and they started doing the Bradley series as a test, and even publicized that recast as a seperate continuity... and then, of course, Bradley actually played the Doctor on TV, thus legitimizing his recasting and BF promptly used Bradley since as their First Doctor.

Beyond that, BF seem to be very loyal to Purves and Russel, and Hines for the Second Doctor, too. Though the latter has let them know that he'd never reprise the Jamie part if he doesn't get to be the Second Doctor as well, so its a less charitable thing there I guess. But loyalty aside, I would have prefered Guilor and Christopher Thomson (the guy I sent his link of a post ago) as the first and second Doctor respectively, as then I wouldn't have to do mental gymnastics to go around an audio story.

 

[Christopher]

Just finished the last Early Adventures installment I have access to, An Ordinary Life. It's quite good, for the most part. It's an excellent story, a terrific concept, set midway through "The Daleks' Masterplan" with Steven and Sara seemingly stranded on 1950s Earth without the Doctor and having to cope with the alienness of everyday 20th-century existence. They get taken in by a family of Jamaican immigrants, and there are resonating themes about coming to an unfamiliar place and starting a new life, as well as a very novel take on the characters of Steven and Sara. I almost regretted it when the inevitable sci-fi monster element came into play, but it was very effectively, eerily handled (despite being very, very reminiscent of a certain '50s sci-fi movie classic) and also fit into the larger themes.

The story's weakness, unfortunately, is in the voices. Peter Purves's Doctor is even less accurate than before, though again the story contrives things so the Doctor is mostly absent except in the fourth episode. And Jean Marsh, quite frankly, sounds elderly. Of all the returning cast members I've heard, she's by far the least successful at sounding any younger than she really is (which was 78 at the time it was recorded), as if she isn't even trying to recapture a younger person's speech rhythms. William Russell and Maureen O'Brien weren't much better at concealing the aged timbre of their voice, but at least they were somewhat able to recapture their younger mannerisms, so that you could recognize Ian's or Vicki's delivery. I don't hear any of that in Marsh's Sara, though admittedly I don't have a clear recollection of Sara's voice in "Masterplan."

On the other hand, Purves still sounds convincingly like his younger self. The behind-the-scenes bit on the previous one reminded me that after Who, he moved into working as an announcer and presenter on things like Blue Peter, and he does have a very good narrator voice. I guess he's kept his voice in good shape over the decades.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

I'll really have to check them out, those Early Adventures. Maybe once I'm done with my marathon and all.

You don't have any access to Second Doctor EA, then?