Big Finish and the Troughton Years

In the DWM Special Edition on The Second Doctor from way back in 2004, Dave Stone argued that it was a very tricky affair trying to recapture Patrick Troughton’s era in print. Not just the mannerisms of the Doctor but the types of stories that would have fitted in to the series between 1967 and 1969. Since the birth of The Companion Chronicles, The Early Adventures and The Lost Stories, Big Finish have ploughed headfirst into the Troughton years and done their best to rekindle that particular fire from almost 50 years ago. How successful have they been in their emulation of, what many consider to be, a golden age of Doctor Who?

Firstly, we must ask ourselves what it is we expect of such a nostalgia trip. What were the Troughton years actually like? Arguably, the three seasons on television are quite distinct. The first is a curious mix of eclectic tales which struggle to settle down into a recognisable show. This is actually quite a fun, freewheeling approach much like Hartnell’s last season. There is nothing very similar about The Highlanders and The Macra Terror aside from the regular cast. The Faceless Ones feels very modern and The Underwater Menace like a B-movie. Troughton’s second season is famous for its monsters and bases under siege and this cannot really be argued against apart from the anomaly that is The Enemy of the World. The third feels a little featureless. Lots of grey sets and dull stories such as The Dominators, The Krotons and The Space Pirates. Like his first series though, this one cannot decide what it wants to be: The Dominators tries to launch a new monster in a political parable. The Mind Robber literally inhabits the realm of fantasy. The Invasion is a Web of Fear retread with more hardware. The Krotons feels like a very traditional story but Doctor Who wasn’t really about this sort of thing from Day One. In fact, there are very few stories quite like The Krotons, only The Savagesspringing to mind. The Seeds of Death is a return to the bases under siege. The Space Pirates is a space opera and The War Games a pseudo-historical epic. There is no real stylistic link between any of the tales on offer here, apart from the fact that they all, bar perhaps ironically The Mind Robber, feel overlong.

Given the above, what do we expect a Big Finish Troughton era CD to be like? Perhaps it depends precisely when the story is set in terms of the three seasons? Even with that in mind though, very few have felt particularly authentic. I wonder if Big Finish are running into the same problems of evocation met by the BBC and Virgin Novels.

To take The Companion Chronicles first: We now have a great wealth of stories from the Troughton era thanks to this fabulous series of narrated readings. The most celebrated examples of The Companion Chronicles output do not come from the Troughton era though. The Hartnell stories are the real gold dust of the series: The Sara Kingdom trilogy, the Oliver Harper trilogy and the fabulous two-handers (The Suffering, The Anachronauts and The Flames of Cadiz) stand head and shoulders above the rest of the stories, aside from perhaps James Goss’s Pertwee tales. The Troughton stories are a mixed bag and struggle to emulate the series from which they spring.

Perhaps closest is Jonathan Morris’s The Great Space Elevator, a true base-under-siege which only slips up with its anachronous title. Morris’s The Glorious Revolution is similarly successful but only really feels like The Highlanders in its presentation which is hardly indicative of the era. Other tales don’t quite feel like true Troughton stories, despite the flexibility of the late 60s tales. The Memory Cheats is a little too dark and political. The Emperor of Eternity is a historical story from a season completely without them. The Jigsaw War sets out to make the most of The Companion Chronicles format rather than the Troughton era and The Dying Light is part of a trilogy of stories featuring other Doctors and a Gallifreyan character. This is not to say that those stories are poor – far from it – but they really don’t feel like they have much to do with the period of Doctor Who from which they purport to originate. The Selachian Gambit comes close. It is a fun romp not a million miles away from The Underwater Menace or The Macra Terror but still feels rather like a base-under-siege story from the following season complete with stomping monsters. The Zoe stories contain a framing device which sets them absolutely after the era in question. The recent stories in the Second Doctor boxset all deal with hard science fiction ideas which the series wouldn’t have dreamt of investigating at the time, aside from The Mouthless Dead which feels like a historical oddity in itself. What can be noted of The Companion Chronicles though, is the incredibly high standard of writing across the board. They are a fabulous testament to the quality of the Big Finish writers, and in Jonathan Morris, John Dorney, Steve Lyons and especially Simon Guerrier, these releases make the writers the real stars of the show, even considering Frazer Hines’s incredible Patrick Troughton impersonation.

The Early Adventures are a little more successful. Simon Guerrier’s The Yes Men sits happily alongside The Macra Terror. The Forsaken feels like it could sit pretty well in a season including The Highlandersand does something interesting with Ben’s character. The Black Hole is a peculiarity, taking into account much of the entire series’ continuity including notably The Two Doctors and the machinations of the Meddling Monk. Most successful of all is paradoxically, the incredibly tiresome Isos Network. Nick Briggs waxes lyrical on the CD extras about how he wanted Isos to feel like a narrated soundtrack of a missing story, complete with longueurs where we cannot see what is happening. In itself, that is a very peculiar thing to set out to do and one which doesn’t reap any rewards, the whole story ending up feeling like listening to The Space Pirates, which is a task for the insane in itself. In its extremely slow, languorous approach, The Isos Network ends up feeling like a typical example of a very poor Season Six story.

Hardly surprisingly, The Lost Stories feel like the most authentic Troughton tales Big Finish has produced. Again, unsurprisingly, it is 1960s veteran writer Donald Tosh who provides the truest evocation of the period in The Rosemariners. A deserted base, a truly effective monster: it is perhaps surprising that this story was dropped from production schedules at the time. Likewise, Lords of the Red Planet truly feels apiece with The Ice Warriors and The Seeds of Death. Its network of tunnels can be very easily imagined and despite a few set-pieces on the planet’s surface – which could actually be imagined as Ealing filming akin to The Moonbase – there is very little about it that can’t be visualised in glorious 405 line black and white. Prison in Space too is very evocative and very funny, using the regulars to great effect. It is understandable how the production team may have lost their bottle at the time given certain aspects of the script but the female dominatrices are used tastefully and are really quite funny to boot. One can easily imagine Frazer Hines and Patrick Troughton absolutely loving the dynamics at play in Prison in Space. Even though the stories are presented as narrated dramatisations, they really do evoke the period in a way that the Companion Chronicles and Early Adventures don’t quite manage. It is perhaps in their boldness, simplicity and singularity of narrative purpose that these stories feel truer.

Perhaps, in the end, the only real way to write a 1960s Second Doctor script proper was to have actually been there at the time? Even so, Big Finish have produced scripts which, even if they don’t quite manage authenticity, stand up extremely well to their television counterparts and provide incredibly good material for the actors and listeners as well as originality, incredible authorly skill and a cartload of adventure. Maybe authenticity doesn’t matter in the end: maybe it’s the quality of the script-writing and in the case of something like The Black Hole or The Jigsaw War, innovation that we ought to be thinking about. Is authenticity outdated? Is authenticity backward looking? I think that perhaps if we’re looking for perfect authenticity, the DVDs are always on the shelf.

Still to come in June 2018: The Second Doctor Companion Chronicles Volume 2! At £20 it’s a steal!

JH