Real Time

 

Chapter the 310th, a fist of absolutely no fun whatsoever.

Plot:

On an unnamed planet in 3286, a regularly occurring temporal wave has caused two survey teams to vanish. The last broadcast picked up from one of the scientists suggests the Cybermen are responsible. So, another team is put together including the Doctor and Evelyn, a mysterious Cyber expert called Goddard who's bound to have a hidden agenda, various redshirts, and a 1990s comedy double-act. With the clock ticking down to the next wave, they investigate a temple containing a time portal. Some of the team are pulled into the portal and reemerge in Cyber form, but a bit rubbish - like they have been converted in a hurry and not very well. The Cyber-Controller, who sits behind the portal trapped in a future time zone, is running low on energy and parts; but it plans to recruit the Doctor to allow the Cybermen to master time travel using the portal and/or his TARDIS (it's not very clear). Goddard turns out to be a cyber-converted human from an alternate timeline in Earth's past (he was born in 1927 and left Earth in 1951). Goddard believes the Doctor is destined to join with the Cybermen who will then travel back to 1927 and use a nano-virus to convert humans into his new type of Cyberman with a brain and a skin exterior, but with internal workings made of machine.

Goddard is one of a group of rebels who have broken their conditioning. He has a reverse-engineered virus based on the original that will destroy cyber enhancement technology, and he's going to use it to kill the Cyber-controller. The Doctor believes that the virus will fall into the Cybermen's hands and they will end up creating the original virus by reverse-engineering Goddard's own reverse-engineering job (bootstrap paradox squared). Evelyn is taken as bait, and sent for Cyber-conversion, but the process is apparently halted before it is complete. One of the comedy double-act is Cyber-converted and the other is killed. The Doctor sabotages the portal, so when the next wave comes it will happen inside the temple rather than outside. When Goddard and the Doctor go through the portal to confront the controller, the converted double-act member's humanity has been reactivated on hearing about the death of his comedy partner. He attacks, and in the confusion the Doctor gets Evelyn out of the portal and back to the safety of the TARDIS. Goddard is trapped as the wave hits, but kills the Controller; unmasking it, he discovers it is Evelyn. In the TARDIS, Evelyn suggests they go to visit 1927, suggesting that she's under Cyber influence and about to start the alternate timeline cycle up again...

Context:

This is another story of nebulous canonical status, so I asked myself my standard questions to decide on its inclusion in the blog. Aptly for a Colin Baker story, it passed with flying colours. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Does it have visuals? Yes; they may be rudimentary, but they are definitely there. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. This assessment done, I watched the episodes, one a night across the best part of a week, in late September 2024. The story is no longer available in its old home of the official Doctor Who website, but there are a few versions available on video sharing platforms.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. Apart from a few extra odds and sods like Real Time that I throw in occasionally, I have completed 27 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

Through 2002 and 2003, the official Doctor Who website launched and then hosted four webcasts - three new stories and a reworked version of the unfinished 1970s story Shada. These were primarily audio stories but with some limited animation. They got more sophisticated as they went along, and culminated in Scream of the Shalka, a potential new start for the series with a brand new Doctor and companion (the return of Doctor Who to TV put paid to it being the start of anything, of course, but that was the intention). Real Time was the second of these four. It followed Death Comes to Time. The initial launch of that story was more exciting by dint of being first, but I think its fair to say that it wasn't well received by a large part of fandom. It was muddled, unnecessarily complicated, unengaging emotionally and far too tied up in detailing lore rather than in telling a story. Real Time followed, its first episode being shown only three months after the last episode of Death Comes to Time. It was definitely seen as better, but to me it was still muddled, unnecessarily complicated, unengaging emotionally and far too tied up in detailing lore rather than in telling a story. Not to the same degree, but enough to be off-putting. I watched the first three episodes on my computer at home in Brighton in August 2002, struggling with bandwidth issues all the while, then I bailed. This watch was my first ever viewing of the second half of the story. Looking back on it now, Real Time does seem like an oddity. It wasn't striving to be a new start like Death Comes to Time or Shalka, and it wasn't a full-on retro celebration like Shada. It was something more run of the mill - a standard adventure with an old Doctor, like dozens of others that Big Finish had made by 2002 and would make in the years afterwards, but this time with pictures.

Reaction:

Real Time takes place in real time, hence the name. If you went into the episodes not knowing that, though, I think you'd be hard pushed to tell, despite the script regularly referencing the ticking clock of the approaching temporal wave. Whether events of a Doctor Who action story take place over about an hour or an evening or a couple of days, they inevitably involve frantic races against the clock and similar structures of cutting back and forth between different breathless scenes of characters trying to survive. If it were one continuous piece, the elapsed story time might be more tangible, but this is disrupted when watching episodically as the original web viewers did, and I did on this watch. As such, Real Time feels no different to any pacey Cyberman story, like Earthshock, say, except in one crucial regard. Being set in a continuity of time tends to dictate that the action also happens in a continuity of place (the area around a temple containing the time portal). The Doctor can't go off for a jaunt and visit the future of the nameless world they are on, or go to 1927 or 1951 on Earth's alternate timeline where time-travelling Cybs have converted everyone. Events in these time zones are crucial to the plot, but the audience can't be shown them. It therefore needs to be told, told, told. This means that almost all of Real Time is spent in breathless scenes of characters exchanging barely comprehensible exposition about the backstory. A story full of time-travel and paradoxes is not trying to do something straightforward like Earthshock, it's trying to do something convoluted like, say, Mawdryn Undead. But in real time. It should have occurred to at least one of the many talented and experienced people involved in this production, who've produced lots more successful Who stories elsewhere (see Deeper Thoughts for more details), that it was the epitome of folly to attempt a story in real time if it involves lots of time travel.

Watching the resultant production is rather like being hit over the head repeatedly with an online fan wiki. It's very hard to follow, and even harder to care much about. To pick one detail that's representative: the very first scene depicts two people who are presumably alternate timeline Cyber rebels sending presumably Goddard back in time; but anyone watching this scene first time won't have a clue who they are or what's going on, and can't work it out until at least episode 5 when all the backstory is finally laid out; by that time, though, there's a real risk that they'll have forgotten all about this first scene. The scene also has the rebels refer to the person being sent as "Doctor", which was deliberate misdirection, I assume, but just muddies the waters further. The scene takes place in 1951, but in a technologically advanced Cyber base so it doesn't look or feel like 1951. What was the point of having the rebels come from an alternate 1951 rather than the story's 'present day' of 3286? It doesn't add anything except more confusion. I'm assuming, given that the story ends on a massive cliffhanger, that it was setting things up for a sequel, a story set in 1927 (when Goddard was first converted as an infant) in which the Doctor would presumably have discovered that Evelyn was under Cyber influence, and put things right, saving her and the timeline. Whether because of a change in the BBC Website team or at Big Finish (who produced the story), or for some other reason, the sequel never came. The ending to Real Time remains unresolved to this day. I'm ambivalent about this. Whatever issues it had, Real Time was a step up in terms of comprehensibility after Death Comes to Time; with a sequel to tie up the many loose ends, it might be thought of more fondly. Alternatively, when one's on a losing streak it's perhaps best to quit early.

Big Finish being involved in a web production means that Colin Baker's allowed to perform the role without having to shout and bluster as he was made to do on TV (by 2002, his Doctor was in a deserved renaissance period thanks to the more sympathetic writing and direction of the audios). Those like me who didn't follow the audios got to experience Maggie Stables playing Evelyn Smythe (a companion character invented for Big Finish). The dynamic between the Doctor and an older female companion is an interesting one, and works well with Baker's approach to the Doctor. Lee Sullivan's art that accompanies the audio is good, with interesting Cyberman design, and a blue version of the Sixth Doctor's costume (this change was made to save the artist realising Colin's usual colourful patchwork affair, but it's generally preferred by fans as the original is a hideous eyesore). The combination of Big Finish and web budget may have meant a stronger draw for contributors. Whether they needed that to get comedy duo Stewart Lee and Richard Herring involved, I do not know. Both do well considering they are not actors; their interplay is natural and balanced between comedy and seriousness; Lee's character's Cyber conversion and subsequent rediscovery of his humanity on finding out about his close colleague's death is the best part of the story. What's odd is that Lee and Herring stopped performing together, amicably, at the end of the 1990s. Aside from a very few and very brief appearances together for charity benefits and the like over the years, Real Time represents their last work as a duo, which is a quirky end for sure. Another bit of stunt casting is of Yee Jee Tso, who played Paul McGann TV Movie companion Chang Lee, appearing in a different role. It's a pretty thankless role with the most exposition to spew of everyone, but nonetheless he too comports himself well. Featuring aspects of classic series, TV movie, and with a eye to the future in a new medium, Real Time is itself something of a nexus point in the history of Who; it's just a shame it wasn't a simpler story.

Connectivity:

Both Real Time and Dot and Bubble feature a main adversary (the Cyber-Controller, the Dot system) that's technologically enhanced, with a metal casing and red eye(s). In both stories, this adversary controls multiple other creatures that are at least semi-organic.

Deeper Thoughts:

Poachers converted to Cyber-Gamekeepers. I've mentioned a few times before on the blog that I have only listened to a very small number of Big Finish Who stories over the many years that they've been made. Only seven stories, in fact (four were the very first Paul McGann starring audios that came out in 2001, because I was curious, the other three were some of those made available on BBC Sounds around Doctor Who's 60th anniversary, because they were free). Given their ubiquity in fandom (they must have created nearly a thousand Doctor Who stories at the time of writing, and they're still churning them out), that low a percentage is remarkable given I'm a fairly active Doctor Who fan, but there's only so many hours in the day. I have in the past, though, listened to a much higher percentage of the Big Finish audios' precursors. These were called Audio Visuals, and were unlicensed and fan-made Doctor Who stories distributed on audio cassette in the 1980s and early 1990s. Somehow, nobody involved in their making was prosecuted by the BBC for flagrant breach of copyright. I assume no profit was being made; I listened to a few tapes that were loaned to me by long-term fan friend David mentioned many times before on this blog; he copied them from other friends, who got them as copies from other friends, and so on. If any money exchanged hands at the start of that chain, I was definitely unaware of it. I doubt it, though, as that wasn't the point. It was instead a chance for everyone involved to do something they really wanted to do in creating engaging new stories based on their favourite TV series, honing their skills. This paid off, as many of the people involved have turned what started as a hobby into a professional career, and a few have even got to work on the series proper.

Big Finish's CD cover for Real Time's audio release

A couple of the key team behind Audio Visuals were Gary Russell (co-creator, writer and producer) and Nicholas Briggs (writer and voice artist playing the Audio Visuals Doctor for most of the stories). Both went on to have significant roles in Big Finish doing Doctor Who stories in a similar way, but with more polish and crucially with a licence from the BBC, so everything was legit. Both would also work on the new series after the show returned in 2005. Briggs has done voice work as Daleks, Cybermen and numerous other monsters, working with every Doctor in the revived era. Russell worked as a script editor on Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, as well as at different times editing Doctor Who Magazine, writing many Doctor Who books (novelisations, novels and non-fiction) and comic strips. He wrote and directed Real Time (anyone can have an off day) and has kept the animation flame alive with work providing visuals for 'missing' Doctor Who stories surviving on audio like Fury from the Deep and The Abominable Snowmen. Bill Baggs, who produced the Audio Visuals stories alongside Russell, has never worked on the new series, but after Audio Visuals he founded BBV Productions to make low-budget video stories using Doctor Who characters or concepts licensed from their owners, or using Doctor Who acting alumni in different roles. A notable person involved in BBV Productions was Mark Gatiss, who wrote many stories in the PROBE series featuring Caroline John as Liz Shaw. He of course went on to write several episodes of new Who, and star in a few too.

Real Time's cast including Nick Briggs

Gatiss, Russell and other writers who'd worked on Audio Visuals also wrote original novels for the Virgin New Adventures range in the 1990s. Paul Cornell was a key contributor to the Virgin New Adventures range, having started writing fan fiction in the 'zines and comic strips in Doctor Who Magazine. He would go on to write a couple of very well regarded new series stories in the early years of the revival. Keith Barnfather's Reeltime Pictures, who Nicholas Briggs was heavily involved with for many years, produced both documentaries and video fiction. Though nobody involved who wasn't also involved with other productions ended up working on the new series, Barnfather still gave opportunities to showcase further work of Who people like Terrance Dicks, Kevin Davies, Mark Ayres, and Philip Martin. Writers who worked on Big Finish audios such as Robert Shearman went on to write for the new series. A later key member of the Big Finish team Scott Handcock was script editor on the most recent (at time of writing) episodes of Doctor Who starring Ncuti Gatwa. Like some kind of metaphorical dandelion clock, Audio Visuals set a hundred seeds onto the wind to fly off into different corners of the Whoniverse, land, and take root. And most of this happened in a period inaccurately called the 'Wilderness years', between 1990 and 2004 when Doctor Who was not being made as an ongoing series by the BBC. That period clearly wasn't a wilderness, it was a crucible of creativity. I'd lobby to rename them the 'Crucible Years' except that sounds too much like a retrospective documentary about early televised snooker in the UK.

In Summary:

An overcomplicated story unfortunately means this is a Real waste of Time.

Dot and Bubble

Chapter the 309th, while democracy is losing its way, and greed is getting greedier, console yourself with a selfie or two, and post them on social media...

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so be warned there are spoilers ahead.] Lindy Pepper-Bean lives in Finetime, with lots of other rich kids aged between 17 and 27, sent there from the home world. She does two hours work a day and moans about it to her online friends, but the rest of the day is for partying. Remotely, though - every interaction Lindy has with her friends or workmates is on a hemisphere of screens (the bubble) projected around her head by a floating light bee (the dot); she never meets anyone IRL. She notices there are less people online than there once were, but doesn't let it worry her when she can instead be watching online heartthrob Ricky September's latest video where he lip-syncs to a song handsomely. On one screen in her bubble, the Doctor appears warning her she's in danger, but she blocks his unsolicited contact request. After a while, Ruby tries and has more luck. Lindy engages with her and discovers there are giant slug-like creatures eating people in Finetime. Weirdly, though, they ignore some people and eat others, with no easily definable pattern. Ruby invites the Doctor to their group chat, and at first Lindy doesn't recognise him as the same person as earlier; she also seems shocked that the Doctor and Ruby are communicating with her from the same room. They are stuck outside Finetime and can't get past the security to get in. They persuade her to escape through some conduits that will lead her to the wilderness outside. Between her and escape, though, are many of the giant slug-like creatures. Luckily, Ricky is there - IRL and everything - and he helps her escape them.

En route to the conduit, Ricky discovers on a video link that the home world's population has all been eaten by the slug monsters. Once Lindy and Ricky are there, the Doctor provides them a set of codes to unlock the exit. Meanwhile, the Doctor is musing on the mysteries of Finetime's situation and realises that Finetime residents are being eaten in alphabetical order; the dot system has somehow become sentient and turned on its masters. Lindy tries to turn her dot off, but it starts whizzing around, swooping at her. When it is just about to kill her, she evades it by telling it Ricky's real surname is Coombes; C comes before P, so Lindy escapes and the dot kills Ricky. Once through the conduit, Lindy finds a handful of Finetime survivors who plan to go out into the wilderness of the planet as pioneers. The Doctor and Ruby are also there; the Doctor tells Lindy and the others that he can take them to safety in the TARDIS, as they'll never survive otherwise. They turn down his help as they are a racist society, and believe that the purity of their community will be contaminated by his presence. The Doctor tries to persuade them, telling them that he doesn't care about their views, he will save them anyway. They will not be persuaded and travel off to their certain doom. He leaves in the TARDIS with Ruby, quite upset by this turn of events.  

Context:

Another Ncuti episode. This wasn't intended to be the next story covered by the blog, but the blog post for another story (not a Ncuti episode) has had to be delayed, even though I'd almost finished writing it. All will become clear in a few weeks' time. In another first for the blog, I did this rewatch of the story (from the BBC iplayer in early September 2024, after only just having watched the story when it came out on Blu-ray) while running on a treadmill - I'm trying to get a bit fitter. Being in motion while watching something on a screen is rather apt for this story, now I come to think of it. I was doing Couch to 5K using an app, so like Lindy Pepper-Bean I had a recorded voice from a personal device telling me when to move and when to stop too.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. A big chunk of serial broadcasting was Ncuti Gatwa's first season, which was shown in May and June 2024. This is the fifth of those seven stories to be covered for the blog. Beyond that, I have completed 27 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

As with all the stories of this run, I watched Dot and Bubble just after midnight, seconds after it landed on BBC iplayer, on the 1st June 2024. Just this once, I was on my own. My usual viewing partner, the middle child (boy, aged 14 at the time) decided to go to bed and watched it separately from me the following day. I will admit now that on that first watch I was a little slow on the uptake. I was thinking all the way through that Lindy was elitist, and that that elitism was built into the insular society of Finetime. At the end of the story, I watched and saw that elitist society reject someone that it perceived as a member of an underclass, even when that someone represented their only hope of survival, meaning their certain death, but I thought I saw it reject Ruby too. It was only just before the credits rolled that the penny dropped: oh, they're racists as well. I then had to rewind Ncuti's performance of frustration and revulsion and watch it again in its proper context. It was early in the morning after a week of work and I was tired, if I can offer that as some defence. Also, I think the story itself is pulling some punches in those final moments. There's a time for subtlety and this wasn't it. I think it would have been fine to have one of the citizens of Finetime explicitly mention the colour of the Doctor's skin, or mention the word 'race', or be excessively accommodating to Ruby and offer her a way to rid herself of the Doctor's company - it wouldn't have the burst the bubble (ahem) in that moment.

Reaction:

Coming immediately after 73 Yards, my favourite story of the year, it was almost certain that Dot and Bubble would be something of a comedown, and then... it wasn't. It was just as good in a different way, and just as haunting in a different way. So, as it turned out, my favourite two stories of the year were the two containing less Ncuti Gatwa than the others. I don't think that's a factor, though: I've enjoyed his performances in all the other episodes, and stories that revolve around his character more (Boom and Rogue, as two examples) are very strong too. Perhaps it's instead because the restrictions of Ncuti's limited availability for filming early on (as he was still working on the fourth series of Sex Education) encouraged the writer of both stories, Russell T Davies, to produce more innovative and interesting narratives. Whatever, the reason - in the opinion of this viewer at least - Davies delivers the goods. He's a writer with a reputation for sometimes not plotting as tightly as he should, but he proves that wrong in Dot and Bubble; it is a masterclass in the careful and gradual release of information. The world and its inhabitants' default behaviour is set up in the initial section, then there are reveals and reversals following one after another as the tension and pace ratchet up to the ending and the final twist (of the knife). Just look at the development of the Mantraps' relationship to the people of Finetime through the running time: there are monsters; the monsters are ignoring Lindy; not just Lindy, they're ignoring some people and not others; the monsters are killing in alphabetical order, so they're not unthinking monsters; Lindy is a monster; every person on Finetime is a monster. Then, after the credits toll, the lingering thought occurs that the Mantraps weren't monsters after all.

As mentioned above, I thought the ending could have been more emphatic. It's fine for the microaggressions thrown the Doctor's way to be subtle before that, that's the point, and I'm sure people of colour picked up on them long before those like me with white privilege. At the end, though, I think the realities of Finetime should have been hammered home  - it's a polemic, after all. We all watch with our own preoccupations, and it sometimes needs a jolt to dislodge them; as an ageing student leftie type, I was hung up on seeing the story as about class, so missed what were only a couple of lines of dialogue at the end that should have clued me in. It's probably a minor point now that Doctor Who is a streaming show first and foremost; the episode certainly rewards further rewatching. Perhaps another detail of the end that should have been beefed up is the danger that the Finetime residents are in, having refused the Doctor's offer of escape. As they travel off in the boat, it needs waves and storm clouds and crashes of thunder to show - rather than just tell - that they aren't going to survive. Such effects for a short sequence might have been budget breaking, but I think they would have helped. I'm also perplexed by the choice of name for the surviving Finetime resident that presents himself as self-styled leader at the end. It's Brewster Cavendish with a 'C', meaning he has managed to survive since almost the beginning of the purge; around a week, based on dialogue elsewhere. He must have found his way out through a conduit sometime before, or discovered some other way to evade the Mantraps. It had already been established that Ricky September was more resourceful than others, but he's a special case. To suggest that others could be too undermines the underlying theme that the lack of diversity in thought and action in this group will be its undoing (or maybe that's my student leftie reading again).

  

The other connection between my two most favoured stories of the year is that they have the same director, Dylan Holmes Williams. He does another sterling job with material very different to 73 Yards. Along with the full crew working at a high, high level, he creates a distinctive and interesting look for this story's world. The Mantraps, like a lot of the monsters of this era of Who, are CG-enhanced real builds, tangible creations worked by puppeteers. They are brilliantly effective. Dots, bubbles and screen after screen of rich kids in stylised clothing, all are effectively realised. What Holmes Williams achieves more than the visuals, though, are some cracking performances. Topmost of these is Callie Cooke's faultless turn as Lindy. It is a knife-edge difficult balance to play: she must seem somewhat sympathetic, but not too much, and Cooke finds that balance and milks every nuance out of the script. The moment where she turns on Ricky so she can save herself is one of those jaw-dropping, spine-tingling reveals; it feels both surprising and inevitable, and that's largely down to the actor and her director expertly realising the excellent script. Also selling it is the reaction from Tom Rhys-Harries as Ricky. He does some great work elsewhere too, peeling back the layers to show a bookish diffidence behind the hunky self confidence of his online persona. He doesn't stay alive for the next layer to be peeled, so we'll never know if he is in goose-step with the misguided ideology of Finetime. I'm sure many a fanboy or fangirl is in denial: if he reads history thoroughly, isn't distracted by screens and is still a racist, he's arguably even worse than Lindy.

The script is full of reversals, but it also acts as one great big bait and switch at the thematic level: it pretends to be a standard issue 'older writer bemoaning a younger generation's social mores' thing, but then reveals its true and much deeper intent. This climaxes in another great moment of performance, Ncuti Gatwa's burst of frustration at the stubborn senselessness of Finetime and its people. It's wonderfully scripted and performed as almost non-judgemental. The Doctor will save people, even if they're racists, and he's more sad than angry; the moment, though, is still imbued with the energy of a God who can't persuade a colony of ants to let themselves be saved. It is a hell of a scene to give an actor on his first day's filming, but Ncuti is nonetheless electrifying.

Connectivity:

There is very little in common between Dot and Bubble and The Curse of Fatal Death, which is a shame as there were numerous fun connections between the Comic Relief sketch and the story I intended to blog next (see Context section above). Never mind, it's all random, and that is the blog's raison d'etre. In both stories, the Doctor is first seen on a screen (as part of Lindy's bubble, and on the Master's TARDIS scanner) before later appearing fully - that's about it.

Deeper Thoughts:

It's a bit like Black Mirror (oh, I'm so clever). Ironically for a story warning of the dangers of social media, this story drove me back to my online feeds, unseen for many months. Except for blogger (I don't count blogger), I had given up the last one that I was still regularly reading - the platform formerly known as twitter - for lent in 2024 and hadn't gone back. The day after my first viewing of Dot and Bubble, still a bit unsure that I'd read the ending of this story correctly (see First Time Round section above), I took a look back into the abyss to check other people's reactions. They were pretty much uniformly positive, which surprised me as no topic on social media usually has such agreement. But people loved it. There was nobody I could see moaning about virtue signalling or woke-ism or whatever. The one thing I did see, though, and this was replicated in online reviews I read over the next few days, were lots of people saying the programme had echoes of Black Mirror, or was ripping off Black Mirror, or was very similar to a specific episode of Black Mirror (2016's Nosedive). Each time I saw the comparison made, it annoyed me for two reasons. First, it felt like each individual was celebrating their own cleverness in detection, as if - forensic scientist style - they had pored over every minute piece of evidence to find this debt to Charlie Brooker's dark TV anthology series. But the writer and executive producer Russell T Davies himself was the one who highlighted it. In an interview. Before Dot and Bubble's broadcast. He was quoted as saying the story was the "clearest step into Black Mirror territory" that Doctor Who had made. All those forensic scientists on the web were examining a 10-foot tall pulsating neon sign pointing in the direction of the murderer, but patting themselves on the back for it.

Maybe Davies was getting the word out early to head off any accusations of plagiarism. Maybe. Was he though? The second thing that annoyed me about the comparison, was that it was wrong. Dot and Bubble wasn't really anything like Black Mirror. What does it even mean to be like a varied anthology series? I haven't seen every episode of Black Mirror ever, but from what I know I'd say its common thread comes down to two things: a focus on the dangers of modern technology, and a dark ending. Doctor Who has done the former throughout its long history; it doesn't do the latter so often, but it still has some history going way back. It's very loose anyway (you can't have too restrictive a template for an anthology series if it's intended to run for a good few years as Black Mirror has). One might as well say that Dot and Bubble was like Inside No, 9 (samples comedy and horror and often has dark twist endings) or Severance (extrapolates the dangers of technological choices with stylised visuals) or many other shows one could list. Dot and Bubble had whopping great drooling slug monsters eating people; the show it was most like was Doctor Who. Anyway, Davies - in the same interview - has said that the original idea was pitched for the 2011 series of Doctor Who, before Black Mirror had ever been shown, but it was felt that the technology wasn't there to do the topic justice at that time. What about the specific episode of Black Mirror that was often mentioned, though? Nosedive was written by Michael Schur and Rashida Jones from a story by Brooker. It deals with a world where social media is voluntary but all pervasive, and features a female protagonist, so it is superficially similar to Dot and Bubble at a very high-level. The warnings that each give about the technology, though, are polar opposites.

Dot and Bubble warns of the dangers of the technology excluding people outside the bubble, and perhaps the warping effect of the echo chamber impacting those within the bubble. It's not clear what's cause or effect - do the citizens of Finetime all live in the same virtual place to keep outsiders out, or did living in the same virtual place lead to them excluding outsiders? Either way, though, those plugged into the technology are all in it together, one exclusive club. In Nosedive, the very point is how the individuals that are plugged in can turn against each other; Nosedive is about people rating one another (something like China's Social Credit System spliced with Uber rankings). The protagonist strives to improve her score out of five, but events conspire to mean it keeps taking a knock. An interesting point to note on similarities between stories is that Nosedive itself was compared in many reviews to an existing piece, an episode of the comedy Community from two years before called App Development and Condiments, which has exactly - and I mean exactly - the same base premise, and lots of other things in common too. It's just a coincidence, though: sometimes ideas have a life of their own and rise up in different places independent of one another. One of the only things that Dot and Bubble and Nosedive have in common is a penchant for pastels in the production design. Again, this is just a coincidence as the reason for it is different in each piece. In Nosedive (and, as it happens, in the Community episode) its about not wanting to give offence by being too bold or colourful: a world where everyone fears the ratings bestowed on them by everyone else bleaches out individuality. In Dot and Bubble, it connotes the pre-existing uniformity and homogeneity of the populace. The final irony of the comparison is that Nosedive ends with its character freed of the fear of being rated, and able to be be bold and colourful and rude. Although it is a dark story, it ends on a tiny moment of hope (so very unlike the usual for Black Mirror, but very like the usual for... Doctor Who). 

In Summary:

Bubblicious.

The Curse of Fatal Death

Chapter the 308th, which may be taking the mickey a little bit.

Plot:

An alternative ninth Doctor and his companion Emma run into the Master. Leaving his speaker on when talking TARDIS to TARDIS, the Master gives away his plans to nobble his fellow Time Lord, but the Doctor isn't interested anyway. He invites the Master to join him in a castle on the planet Tersurus where he announces he's giving up his do-gooding to get married to Emma. The Master tries various attempts to capture the Doctor using many traps he has travelled back in time and bribed an architect to install in the castle. The Doctor, though, has also gone back and bribed the architect to undo the stuff that the Master insisted on. The Master keeps falling through a trap door into the Tersuran sewers, then taking hundreds of years to climb back out. Each time, he pops back to the right moment in his TARDIS having aged more and more. Fed up with this, the Master teams up with the Daleks who rejuvenate him with Dalek technology. The baddies plan to use a Zektronic energy beam to conquer the universe. The Doctor and Emma escape, but the Doctor is wounded and regenerates into a quite handsome Doctor. Fixing the out-of-control Zektronic beam causes the Doctor to regenerate into a shy Doctor and then a very handsome Doctor. He is then zapped again. With his powers of regeneration halted by the energy of the blast, it looks as if he's died after an emotional farewell to Emma. The Daleks and the Master vow to turn to good in memory of the Doctor. Then, miraculously another regeneration starts, and the Doctor becomes a woman. Emma is no longer attracted to the Doctor, but the Master is. As they walk off together, the new Doctor asks the Master how he got his nickname, and he says he'll explain later.

Context:

So, is this taking the mickey? As per the milestone watch below, I am running out of stories to cover on the blog, so am on the look out for spin-offs and non-canonical Doctor Who to keep things going a little longer (otherwise this blog will just be writing up Ncuti Gatwa's new stories one by one in order, spoiling the intended random approach). There's got to be limits, though: in a recent post I set out the questions that I would have to ask myself about any story included for the blog. Does it star the Doctor? This is answered by an emphatic 'Yes' in the case of The Curse of Fatal Death - it starts five of them. Does it have visuals? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes (after its broadcast as part of a telethon, it received a VHS release as part of the Doctor Who range). Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. Finally, though, there was this question: is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? I think that The Curse of Fatal Death goes beyond just being a skit. It's a BBC-commissioned live action version of Who, the only such between the Paul McGann TV movie and the 2005 relaunch; it's a love letter to the show, and has a structured narrative with beginning, middle and end as well as cliffhangers and surprises. Rowan Atkinson is playing it pretty straight too. I watched on Youtube one evening on my own (an extended Doctor Who sketch from 25 years ago would have been a hard sell to any of the family, so I didn't try).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. Apart from a few extra bits and bobs like The Curse of Fatal Death that I throw in occasionally, I have completed 27 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I had a strong memory of this, and it was completely wrong. I can remember very well having a discussion with mates about going to a St. Patrick's day night at a pub, but they were staying in to watch Comic Relief. I was astonished that anyone, even a Doctor Who fan anticipating some new televisual material, would choose to stay in and watch the - forgive me, I know it's for a good cause and all - protracted bore-fest that is Comic Relief when they could be drinking Guinness and singing an off key version of Dirty Old Town with complete strangers. But I got no takers. I went to the pub on my own, and did indeed drink Guinness and sing an off key version of Dirty Old Town with complete strangers. I thought this was 1999, when Doctor Who was forming part of Comic Relief's offerings, but looking at the date of the broadcast that year it was on the 12th March, too far away from St. Patrick's Day for any pub to have a tie-in. I'm guessing that I'm remembering events from two years later in 2001 when patron saint and charity telethon more closely aligned. I then remembered that I have access to my 1999 diary, so checked out the entry. I was instead at a leaving do for someone at my day job of the time. So, I did indeed skip the live broadcast, taping and watching back The Curse of Fatal Death at a later date (I must have had to use an entire E180 on LP mode to capture everything from the evening, fast forwarding to the Doctor Who bits). There's nothing in the diary entries of the next few days about the skit (I was 26, it's not the sort of thing I was writing about at the time) but I estimate I wouldn't have waited much after the 13th March to watch it.

Reaction:

Imagine a parallel universe where this was the last ever Doctor Who broadcast on television by the BBC. As I've mentioned in blog posts before, the period encompassing the end of the 1990s and start of the 2000s was a low point for my favourite show. The excitement of the 30th anniversary in 1993 and an American co-production TV movie in 1996 had faded; Doctor Who appeared to be dead, and there was nothing, not even the slightest hint, to suggest it was going to lurch back into life again. If the 2005 relaunch had not happened, and there's all sorts of reasons why it might have stalled, The Curse of Fatal Death wouldn't be the worst send-off one could imagine. It's full of love for the programme, has a couple of really rather good jokes, and some fun cameos of stars as the Doctor giving us a glimpse into how they'd play the role. At least a couple of those, Jim Broadbent and Hugh Grant, were - and I think still are - too big to take the role on properly; they were flippin' movie stars, we were briefly very blessed. Of all of the cameos, Hugh Grant plays it straightest, even more than Atkinson, and his death scene is almost emotional. He's still playing it a bit 'Edwardian' compared to the more modern and slightly more down-to-earth approach that became the norm from 2005 onwards; Doctor Who had not yet dumped that baggage. Who could still hold its own as an entertaining segment on primetime TV, though, which was a good sign for the future. Another sign of the future was its writer, Steven Moffat, someone who subsequently has written by far the most Doctor Who episodes to entertain audiences of primetime TV of anyone (as contributing writer and/or showrunner from 2005 to date); so, it's good that he started practising early.

Moffat's key aim is to generate jokes, and there's three types of these on show in increasing levels of specific geekiness. First, there's general humour: there's a lot of fart jokes, for example, emerging from the premise that the people of the planet Tersurus communicate by controlled release of methane. A lot of these jokes were - in my opinion, natch, humour is subjective - rubbish; but the line about how the Tersurans died out ("They discovered fire") is a 24-carat killer line. It still falls a bit flat, though - what the programme needs is an audience laugh track to lift it. I don't remember whether it did have as part of the telethon, but none of the versions I've found online do. The second type of humour is the generic, i.e. jokes about general science fiction tropes like Jonathan Pryce's cackling and monologuing as the Master. A long sequence that is gleefully ripping off Bill and Ted falls into this category, where the Doctor journeys back in time to undo the mischief that the Master has done, then the Master travels back to undo that undoing, and the Doctor travels back to undo that, and so on. Finally, there's the third category, humour specifically about Doctor Who: jokes about Daleks not having noses or chairs, for example, or jokes about the ubiquity of quarries. The running gag of waving away the need to clarify the action with an "I'll explain later" was presumably directed at Who too, though I don't think the programme does this as much as is made out. Just when Moffat looks to be overusing the phrase, he saves it by turning it into the Doctor's faltering final words as he is dying, then puts a cherry on it at the end by turning it into a bedroom double entendre about why the Master is so called.

Moffat is clever enough not to do any jokes about Doctor Who's sets wobbling. Firstly because he knows that was never really true anyway, but also because he was probably aware that - being for charity - his story would need to be done on the cheap. The sets, props and effects are as good as can be expected in those circumstances. The score uses many recycled cues from the Who archive, so even if one wasn't enjoying the comedy one could play a game of name that tune (and name the episode it comes from) as one watches. The overall result of all this is a little cheesy, but inoffensive and at times almost magical. It also gives Moffat a chance to road test some things he would return to in his future stories: the Doctor falling in love and getting married, a gender swap regeneration, a Time Lord aged by a thousand plus years, the Doctor miraculously regaining the power to regenerate when it was thought that he could do so no more, the Daleks having a chair for no apparent reason, a character quoting Terrance Dicks in saying that the Doctor was "never cruel or cowardly", having a character say a line something like "Look after the universe for me - I've put a lot or work into it". It's not just Moffat getting the benefit, though. At the time it seemed like Doctor Who needed Comic Relief, but looking back now I think that it was more likely that Comic Relief needed Doctor Who. There's something special about the programme that started in 1963 that makes it able to endlessly generate concepts and visuals and jokes (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more of this topic), which is exactly what the charity that started in 1985 consumes rapaciously to power good works.

Connectivity:

Both The Curse of Fatal Death and Rogue feature the Doctor attracted to someone, with hints about his getting hitched (wedding plans with Emma, a proposal on one knee from Rogue); they also both feature a fleeting appearance by Richard E Grant playing the Doctor.

Deeper Thoughts:

Sketchy History. The history of Doctor Who take-off skits and sketches is almost as long as the history of Doctor Who itself. This is literally true: Michael Bentine comedy show It's a Square World featured a sketch with Clive Dunn as a parody of the Doctor (in a William Hartnell style costume) that was broadcast on the last day of 1963 when only one complete Doctor Who story had yet been shown. Writing and production were even earlier than that, with pre-filming done on 9th December 1963 (when only three episodes of Doctor Who had aired) and studio shooting on 20th December 1963 (when only four episodes of Doctor Who had aired). The concepts and visuals of the show clearly had an instant impact such than any comedian or satirist could be sure that the audience would know what was being parodied; this was, of course, even before the Daleks had reared their ugly domes. Once Skaro's finest had glided into the public consciousness, the chances for making fun were multiplied. Through the 1960s and 70s, many comedy and variety shows would use the show's iconography, with and sometimes without Daleks: Bernie Winters, Wayne and Shuster, The Black and White Minstrels, Crackerjack, Basil Brush, Rod Hull and Emu, Spike Milligan, and many more - all did sketches, and some even resisted basing their material on the old canard that Daleks can't go upstairs. These were affectionate (towards Doctor Who, I mean, the Minstrels and Milligan's sketches were likely to offend in other ways), which represented how the show was thought of in wider society in those times. By the 1980s, it felt to me like something changed and the humour tended to be slightly more at the programme's expense, but it was a big programme by then and could take it.

Clive Dunn and Michael Bentine

A trio of late 1980s sketches from BBC TV programmes were included on the VHS release of The Curse of Fatal Death as extras, and so became most well known to fandom: a sketch from The Lenny Henry Show, a very short sketch from Victoria Wood As Seen On TV, and an unused sketch from French and Saunders (which was shot on the set of The Trial of a Time Lord). All these took some pot shots at the complicated continuity of the show, or its lack of good material for women, or its silly design, or its silly names. Some of the barbs were unfair, but it's hard to argue with most of that. Henry's portrayal of the Doctor, and a little anti-Thatcher political humour (a few years before the series did something similar itself in The Happiness Patrol), make his sketch one of the most worth watching. Once the show was off the air, there was still the odd skit being made occasionally. Doctor Who fans on the writing and performing sides of the Dead Ringers crew meant that show - on radio or TV - featured Doctor Who-related gags frequently, and this continued when their sketches were riffing on Doctor Who made after 2005. Though some talented people have made Doctor Who sketches in the 2010s and 20s (not least Harry Hill and Rhys Thomas) and Who-related material has featured again in Comic Relief nights over the years, there's been little to my mind that made as much impact as The Curse of Fatal Death, even the very funny and reasonably well budgeted The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot made by Peter Davison for the 50th anniversary. But there was one sketch that did draw a lot of attention, albeit partially for the wrong reasons, which aired only a few months after Steven Moffat's Comic Relief opus.

Lenny Henry

On BBC2 in November 1999, there was a Doctor Who Night, a few hours where the channel was given over to themed programming about the series. During the night, there were three sketches made by and starring Mark Gatiss and David Walliams, both Doctor Who fans and comedians who subsequently became much more famous than they were then (and both appeared in Doctor Who subsequently too, with Gatiss also writing multiple episodes). Moffat was magnanimous enough to say that the sketches were much funnier than The Curse of Fatal Death, and I felt the same (it was the difference between broad mainstream jokes on BBC1 and edgier humour on BBC2). Two of the sketches were innocuous enough, even though one did feature a couple of fans kidnapping Peter Davison ("Do you think it would be alright to kiss Peter Davison?" "Yes"). But then there was The Pitch of Fear. It was a clever sketch that involved Walliams pitching the whole of the 26 years of the classic series to the BBC as if it were fully planned in advance - a sample gag is that Jon Pertwee's agent had been approached and he's becoming free in 1970, but they have to release him in 1974 because he's "got Worzel Gummidge". Again, harmless stuff, but there was also another line in there about casting that caused more of a stir. "I don't want to do this show," says the pitcher, "Unless we get the most charismatic, talented actors to play the Doctor." "For the whole 26 years?" asks the Exec. "Nah, towards the end, just any old f**ker with an equity card." It's a very funny line, but - unlike the Doctor, according to Terrance Dicks's famous description - it was a bit cruel, and maybe also a bit cowardly.

Mark Gatiss in The Pitch of Fear

The writer-performers of the sketch were probably referring more to public perception of Doctor Who performances in the 1980s than their own views of their quality. A lot of people felt and still feel that Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy - and less but some think this of Peter Davison too - weren't as good hires as the earlier Doctors. It was also likely (given that pot shots had been taken earlier in the sketch about his costuming decisions) that it was John Nathan-Turner, the producer in those later years, that was the real target of any criticism. A celebratory night about Doctor Who, however irreverent, probably wasn't the place to suggest anyone who'd worked on the show in a prominent role was not charismatic or talented, though. Gatiss had worked with Davison, Baker and McCoy on fan projects when he was less well known, which made it personal for some involved. Gatiss expressed regret and the sketch was re-edited, shorn of its funniest line for its official release (as an extra on a DVD release a few years later). With new episodes regularly being made, turning in a short scene for Comic Relief or for Children in Need now is an easy ask, but obviously will be less special than in 1999 when any tiny fragment - even if played for laughs - would be all that fans had seen for years, and might be the last they ever saw. So, unless anyone is prepared to be outrageously rude about people who star in or make Doctor Who again, I can't see any future sketch having the impact of those broadcast in 1999. But maybe that's a good thing.

In Summary:

A bit naff, but it was for charity.