Slipback

Chapter the 324th, which covers a Hiatus Hitch-Hiker homage.

Plot:

The Doctor and Peri arrive on a space freighter, the Vipod Mor, as the TARDIS has picked up evidence of dangerous time experiments happening aboard. The experiments are the work of the ship's computer, which has decided that humanity is evil and must be rebooted; it has lured the Doctor to the ship deliberately to get his help. Peri gets split up from the Doctor and meets two undercover police officers searching for an art thief (who turns out to be one of the ship's officers, and nothing to do with the main plot). The captain of the ship has the ability to deliberately generate illnesses in himself that he can then pass on to other people; he gets very depressed at not being able to meet Peri, and incubates an incurable disease that could wipe out the crew; this doesn't happen in the end, and also has nothing to do with the main plot. Reaching out mentally to the Doctor has caused the computer to develop a split personality. It defeats itself, with its good side taking the ship far back in time and setting it to self-destruct. The Doctor is about to avert the explosion, when a Time Lord instructs him not to as it will be the big bang that creates the universe. The Doctor dwells on his meddling behaviour. Presumably, all the crew of the ship are therefore killed.

Context:

Another journey off the straight and narrow of official canon requires answering my standard set of questions of Slipback. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or 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. Does it have pictures? Ah. Without that last hurdle cleared, the choice was either not to blog it, or to relax the rule. I don't want to open the floodgates for every Big Finish audio there's ever been or I'll never ever be finished. On the other hand, some of the missing TV stories already blogged were experienced with no visuals, and some webcasts and recons had barely more than a still image changing every so often. After some thought, I decided to remove that question from the set; I doubt I'll make a habit of covering audio-only stories, but one or two won't hurt. It's also nice to boost Colin Baker's total, as he made so few stories for TV. As I was considering all this, I realised that it must be getting on for the 40 year anniversary of the announcement that Colin's Doctor was going to be taken off TV for 18 months, a period later known as the Hiatus. Slipback originally aired during that period. When I checked it out, I found the exact date of the announcement was the 27th February 1985. On the day I checked it out, it was the 26th February 2025. On the anniversary the next day, I commemorated the event that still lives in the psyche of many who were fans at the time (see Deeper Thoughts below for more details) by listening to Slipback from CD, all in one sitting.

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. To put that point off a bit, just so the blog doesn't have a period where I just cover a succession of Ncuti Gatwa stories, I am throwing in a few spin-offs and oddities like Slipback. Beyond those, I have completed nine Doctors' televisual eras proper (the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 35 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

It was 1986 before my family got either a video player or a stereo with radio and tape-deck built in; so, Slipback, broadcast in July and August 1995, was officially the last Doctor Who I couldn't record for posterity. It disappeared into the ether, only persisting in my memory. Not even persisting in my memory, to be honest, because I only listened to the first two episodes. The mechanics of catching it were just too much of an - and I'll use a technical radio term here - absolute ball-ache. It was broadcast in the UK on BBC Radio 4, but not as a programme in its own right; instead, it formed two short segments of a long magazine show called Pirate Radio 4. This ran on three Thursday mornings in the school holidays from 9am to midday, and contained no other segments of interest to this teenager; plus, there weren't separate times for the different segments given in listings. So, I'd have to get up early and stay by the radio for anywhere up to the whole three hours to be absolutely sure I could catch twenty minutes of Doctor Who. After the first time, it didn't seem worth the effort. The story was released on cassette and vinyl in 1988, but I didn't buy it then. I first got to hear the latter two-thirds of the story in 2001, when it was re-released on CD. In between, it was novelised as part of the Target Doctor Who books range. I bought that book, and read it a few times. As I'll touch on in the Reaction section below, Slipback was trying very hard to be like Douglas Adams's work. Maybe it was falling short, but I was young enough not to have discernment, and Adams books didn't exactly get published at an urgent frequency. As such, I fell upon the book with more enthusiasm than it deserved, just because of an aching withdrawal from the real thing. It was like Hitch Hiker methadone.

Reaction:

It's a sci-fi show on the radio in the 1980s, so it was very likely it would ape Douglas Adams's work. The initial radio version of The Hitch Hiker's Guide of the Galaxy in the late 1970s was such a big hit, spawning a TV series and four best-selling novels in the first half of the 1980s, that in 1985 it would have been the first place anyone's imagination went to if creating a relatively light-hearted audio sci-fi story. Eric Saward, writer of Slipback, should possibly have taken time enough to think of a different approach and come out from under the long shadow that Adams was casting; but, I don't want to judge too harshly, as I don't know how long he had. I get the impression that Slipback may have been a rush commission. So, the audience gets some quite familiar moments, such as computers and robots with irritatingly inappropriate personalities, a couple of aggressive space policemen, someone doing a voice like Sandra Dickinson's while reciting probabilities (as Dickinson did as Trillian in the TV version of Hitch Hiker), the captain of a spaceship in a bath, the Doctor talking about going to parties and drinking in a way that's out of character for him but wholly within the character of Ford Prefect, and the weaponisation of awful poetry. What the script struggles to do is find the level of cosmic absurdity in its jokes that Adams's best work has. The most original concept is the Captain's ability to make his psychosomatic illnesses real, and then pass them on to other people, but it isn't integrated into the plot very well. The Doctor only finds out about the threat second-hand without meeting the captain, and never resolves that subplot before the end.

Also at the cosmic scale, of course, is the revelation that the Vipod Mor's time-travel self-destruct is the cause of the big bang that created the universe. This doesn't count in the script's favour, however, as it is such a hackneyed plot device from many a science fiction story before and after Slipback. One instance of such a reveal was in the Doctor Who story Terminus from only two years earlier, which one would think Saward would have remembered as he worked on the story as script editor. Apart from a few homages to Hitch Hiker, and this twist at the end - the resolution of which creates a significant problem of protagonist passivity that I'll touch on in a moment - there's not much here. There are a handful of characters who aren't great company for the listener (and this includes the Doctor and Peri who are still in their bickering mode from season 22 rather than the more friendly relationship the actors insisted on in the next season). These characters mill about, not fully interacting with one another or with the main plot. At the climax, after doing some investigation but not really influencing the events taking place, the Doctor leaps into action to stop the Vipod Mor's explosion. Then, an almost literal Deux ex Machina ending occurs: a Time Lord appears and decides how the story will end, ticking the Doctor off for almost averting the creation of the universe. The Doctor backs down, defeated and chastened. This doesn't sit right with me for the character or the genre: couldn't the Doctor have still worked to save the crew of the Vipod Mor? The way it plays out, it looks like he leaves them to their fate, but nobody needs to be on the ship when it explodes (the computer is controlling the ship, after all).

This means that the Doctor doesn't really do anything in the story. Okay, his personality being imprinted on the computer causes a battle within the machine for control by the two sides of its split personality, which the good, Doctor-influenced side eventually wins. It nonetheless leaves Colin Baker as a bystander in his own show. It's even more evidence backing up my theory that Eric Saward, maybe subconsciously, maybe not, hates the Doctor and Doctor Who. The Time Lords are supposed to be the dull, rigid forces of conformism that inhibit the Doctor's ability to make a difference in his adventuring; yet, in this story the Time Lord has the moral victory. Questioning the central morality of the series and its protagonist might be a good topic for a story, but only if it formed one small part of a series where the rest of the time the Doctor is portrayed as a positive force for good. Otherwise, what is the audience left with: the adventures of a bungling interventionist who needs a schoolmaster lecture any time he tries to do anything? Why would anyone want to watch or listen to that show? It certainly couldn't be covered adequately in a tossed-off little trifle for kids on the radio. Saward had another crack at it; the following season that the viewers would have the long wait to see also focussed a majority of its time on explicitly criticising the Doctor's behaviour, rather than just letting him have fun adventures. Like that next season, Slipback also has ridiculously overblown cliffhangers with the Doctor saying things like "Peri! Nooooooooooo!!!!!", but that's quite fun to be honest. Concentrate on that, and doing the I-Spy book of Douglas Adams references, and you can just about get through the hour of Slipback. Just about.

Connectivity:

Like last time, there's a great link to The Savages (the antagonist attempting to use the Doctor inadvertently picks up some of his personality); unfortunately, The Savages wasn't the last story blogged (though the Deeper Thoughts section covered the animation of it). The Romans and Slipback at least have in common that both feature the Doctor and alcohol (he sips wine on the TV, and on the radio he's recovering from a night where he drank three bottles of fictional tipple Voxnic).

Deeper Thoughts:

The 40 Year-Old Hiatus. Slipback probably got more attention from fans than it would have done, had it not been the only small trickle of new Who action available during an 18 month drought. The announcement and news stories came before Colin Baker's first full run in 1985 had even finished: the show had come close to cancellation, but instead it would be off screens for substantially longer than usual before it returned in 1986. This has been documented extensively elsewhere, but I don't know how easy it is for someone who wasn't a fan at the time to appreciate from that documentation how it felt. In the 1970s, Doctor Who would be on for half of the year, off for half the year, with six month gaps between runs. In the Peter Davison and Colin Baker eras (first because of episodes being shown twice weekly, then because of double-length episodes) the seasons were got through in three months, and the gaps between stretched to nine. From the start of April 1985, fans faced a wait double that length, and three weeks of short radio episodes four months in to that wait didn't do too much to soften the blow. Don't get me wrong, though; the blow wasn't about the length of the wait; this wasn't about a lot of spoilt people petulantly stamping their feet and demanding their Who fix now, now now! Some felt like that, I'm sure, but for them (even if they didn't realise it) and for everyone else, the real blow was the forced realisation that Doctor Who being on the TV in any calendar year was optional. I don't think that had penetrated fan psyches before; they could - and did - slag off the show's quality ad nauseum in the knowledge that it would always come back, always evolve. Now, it looked vulnerable, it looked like, on any particular day, it could just stop and not come back for a long time, or at all.

The Sun 1985 Doctor Who speculation

If this had a greater impact anywhere than in the minds of fans, it was in the UK's tabloid media landscape. Doctor Who always made for good press, with all those photo splashes of Daleks and Cybermen queueing for buses, and speculations on whom the new Doctor Who would be, and whatnot. From 28th February 1985 - when stubbornly popular red-top the Sun's front page headline was "Dr Who is Axed in a BBC Plot" - a new seam opened up which has been mined every since: speculations on if the new Doctor Who would be. It's no exaggeration that ever since then stories of the cancellation versus the continuation of Doctor Who have been a constant back and forth on the inky pages, and latterly online websites, of the simpler wing of the fourth estate. In February and March 2025, 40 years on, this phenomenon was again witnessed in a high concentration of speculative articles. These suggested, amongst other things, the following: Ncuti Gatwa was thinking of leaving, or had already left having filmed his regeneration scene; this was because he wanted to go and work in Hollywood, or that he felt that the programme's quality was reflecting badly on him; Doctor Who was facing cancellation because of low ratings, or because of poor management; David Tennant was coming back to play the Doctor again; there had been lots of lay offs in the production team, etc. etc. Some of this was contradictory. If Doctor Who was being cancelled, Ncuti Gatwa would be free to do whatever he wanted and wouldn't have to make a big deal of leaving. If Doctor Who's future was in any doubt, would a regeneration scene really have been filmed (who would they regenerate Ncuti into, if the show wasn't necessarily going to carry on)? The mention of lay offs smacked of dodgy reporting. Almost all the people working on Doctor Who will be freelancers, just because of the nature of the industry, and wouldn't be laid off, just would not have their contracts renewed. This has almost certainly happened.

The 2025 version: an image from The Sun's website

Putting aside speculation, and taking the consistent official statements made on the subject at face value, it is known that Disney+ have not made a decision yet on whether they will continue to co-fund Doctor Who beyond their initial commitment of two series and one spin-off. They will make this decision after Ncuti's second series drops. The production team would no doubt have wanted the decision to be earlier than this. The date for the first episode of the series becoming available has been confirmed as 12th April 2025. In March 2025, post production would be very close to completion for that series, and well underway for the spin-off too (it finished production at the end of December 2024). If a positive decision had been made by Disney+ before, then everyone engaged on the production could have rolled on to a third series (for which Russell T Davies has already written scripts, in order to be ready) without any break. As it is, it would be expensive to keep a lot of contracted crew benched awaiting a decision. So, of course, people will have had their contracts come to end. Perhaps a disgruntled one of their number was a source of the story. Perhaps it was just some rabid Doctor Who fan on social media speculating. Or perhaps there's no source at all, as anyone following things closely could have knocked up such a piece, as long as they weren't too bothered about the truth. For example, all the stuff about bad ratings was disingenuous. First, the most recent story broadcast Joy to the World was in the top ten for Christmas Day and the whole Christmas week, which is hardly cause for concern. Second, that positive rating, and any less positive figures for the series preceding it, mean nothing to Disney+; they will only be interested in their own metrics, which don't include the UK screenings.

Series '2' is coming soon...

Usually streamers keep such things closely guarded, but surprisingly, in the midst of all the negativity, some detail was released, and it was very positive: Doctor Who was in the Disney+ global top 5 for every week when the episodes first became available. If the next series fares as well, is this enough for the House of Mouse to say 'Yes', and for the series to be recommissioned? Only they know for sure. If they don't invest, is the show's UK performance sufficient for the BBC to continue alone, or at least to try to find another source of co-production funds? Only they know for sure. There's every reason for optimism; but, it does seem likely that, if production can only resume in May 2025 at the very earliest, then there will be another hiatus before we get a new season. But we fans have coped with that before, and we can again. In the mean time, there's a brand new series of Doctor Who coming soon to enjoy.

In Summary:

Just about tolerable at an hour's length; but, obviously, real Douglas Adams is better.