Start to Finish: 8.03 - Upstairs

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Rounding off a double dose of Doctor Number 1 - and he's back after the next story - our trip through the Companion Chronicles brings us to Mat Coward's claustrophobic Upstairs. The play is narrated by Maureen O'Brien's Vicki, and has no other voices except for Peter Purves providing the voice of second companion Steven.

The TARDIS materialises in an attic in London in the late nineteenth century. A little exploration reveals that it is part of a vast network of rooms, with no stairs down and a serious fungal infestation. Then they try to find their way back, and realise that they are moving in time as well as space, through a near-infinite complex of identical rooms in the attic spaces of Downing Street. That would be bad enough, even if they weren't sharing the space with a conspiracy of deferential servants intent on moulding (sorry, not sorry) a pan-temporal fungus into the God-Prime Minister of the Eternal British Empire.

Yeah, so this is a weird one. Not The Time Vampire weird, but definitely off-kilter, with its time fungus and wacky conspiracy of the self-loathing servant classes. O'Brien and Purves bounce off each other nicely, and the Doctor is done well, deep in his most know-it-all phase. The opening half is more effective than the latter, with the claustrophobic reveal of the infinite attic working better than the sinister servants, who are a little too reflexively deferential to be truly menacing. As so often has happened, I found it better on a re-listen than I remembered it being.

Next up, Jo Grant is a Ghost in the Machine. As we close in on the end of the series, I begin to ponder tackling some of the other Big Finish releases, not least to keep getting my money's worth from them. Perhaps the main range, as far as I was able to stay up to date, or maybe the also-finished (rather abruptly) Tomorrow People audio series.