Time for another plug.
Out now, courtesy of Big Finish Productions, is Doctor Who:
Phantoms Of The Deep, a new audio adventure written by yours truly, starring
Tom Baker as the Doctor, Mary Tamm as his companion Romana and John Leeson as
the robotic dog on casters K-9. The story is set in the deepest depths of the
ocean, specifically the Mariana Trench, and concerns all sorts of sinister
goings-on with various denizens of the dark. It combines Doctor Who with one of my other little obsessions, deep-sea creatures.
Having listened to it last night,
I have to say that director Ken Bentley and noise bod Jamie Robertson have done
an exceptional job on it. Irrespective of any qualities of the script, the end
result is fast-moving, suspenseful, atmospheric and scary, and sounds like a
big-budget movie. I couldn’t be more pleased with the end result, and as with
all these projects, I feel very lucky to have been involved, like I’ve won some
sort of competition.
In particular, and I may have mentioned it before so please feel free to glaze over, there was the moment in the recording studio where I
heard Tom and John record their first scene together as Doctor and dog. Now,
Tom was on fine form, full of energy and enthusiasm, firing on every cylinder
going, and when John Leeson does the K-9 voice, he sounds pretty much identical
to how he did on telly back in the day (they stick an electronic effect on too,
but not so that you’d notice.) So there I was, Jonny the balding
thirty-something fan, sitting in the recording control room and I hear the Doctor
and K-9 speaking words I’ve written, sounding for all the world like it’s 1978
and they’re back in the TARDIS and suddenly I’m Jonathan, five years old, sitting
cross-legged about a dozen inches from the television. It was a real feeling, a
visceral jolt of nostalgia, like I’d done some time-travelling of my own. Now,
I can’t guarantee this audio will have that effect on every listener but it did
on me. There was quantifiable ‘indefinable magic’.
Reviewers so far have been very kind to take pains to
mention that this story was recorded before the recent television adventure set
in a submarine, as I seem a little foolish (well, a little more foolish than
usual) in the accompanying interview saying that there’s never been a Doctor
Who story set on a submarine before (at least, to my knowledge). To give an
idea of time-scales, I wrote Phantoms back in August 2011 with it being
recorded in October; long before anyone working on the TV show had even heard
of submarines. (At the same time, I was finishing The Child of Time comic
strip and script-editing The Wrath of the Iceni, and don’t they both seem like
distant memories?)
In the writing of it, this was one story where it all just
clicked, where every problem became a plot twist and everything just fitted
together so neatly by accident it looked like I’d done it intentionally. The
intention with it was to do something as different from The Auntie Matter as
possible, to show my ‘range’ if you like, to go dark and claustrophobic where I’d
been sunny and expansive, but to be even more fast-moving, more tightly-plotted
than before. I very strongly believe that you not only can tell the equivalent
of an old four-part story within 45 minutes but that you should. Not just to
give fans bangs for bucks, but because we’re all so familiar with the format we
can take chunks of it ‘as read’. Compressing a story down, taking half a dozen
lines of dialogue and getting the same amount of meaning, character and humour across
in two lines, that’s what re-writing’s all about.
