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.