Start to Finish - Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

With The Companion Chronicles all relistened to and reviewed for now, I'm going to take a crack at one of the weirder offshoots of Big Finish's audio empire: Doctor Who: The Stageplays, audio adaptations of the three attempts to bring the Doctor to the stage, beginning with the biggest and glitziest of them all, 1989's Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure.

As the Daleks, allied with the Cybermen and a force of space mercenaries(1) plot the destruction of the Earth, the Doctor and his companion Jason are summoned by the British PM, Mrs T, to protect a vital peace conference by safeguarding an American envoy on his visit to a nightclub. It is a mission that will take them and their new travelling companion Crystal across time and space, into and out of deadly danger, in the course of which they will face flying insect people, volcanos, lasers, romances, and songs!

Yes, songs. Buckle up, kids; it's Doctor Who! The Musical.

The Ultimate Adventure and its companions are in many ways a textbook example of why it's not a good idea to directly adapt a stage play to audio, and it's odd that a company so deeply steeped in the medium would include so many clunky 'look at that' lines as they do here. On the other hand, this was a play that was written with an eye to visual spectacle, and too great a concession to the transfer might have robbed it of some of its own charms, and for all its cheesy madness, it is very charming. The plot is bonkers: The Daleks' master plan (not to be confused of course with 'The Daleks' Master Plan',) is fundamentally broken and ultimately fails because the Emperor Dalek couldn't help gloating, and despite the attempts to make their mission feel time critical the whole thing takes a back seat for much of the second act while the story meanders through a series of set-pieces included to please the producer. The performances are mostly sound, although the American envoy couldn't sound less American if he were trying(3) and Noel Sullivan of Hear'Say is about as convincingly French as the cast of Allo Allo.

The original (apart from Colin Baker) stage cast, including Zog the Denebian.

The script was produced in a very short window by Terrance Dicks after then wunderkinds of the TV series Cartmel and Aaronovich turned in an offering that was possibly unfilmable and certainly unstageable. The Doctor was replaced part-way through the brief run due to Jon Pertwee's failing health, with Colin Baker stepping into a role heavier on action and gallantry than his usual metier. Baker reprises that performance here, committing to record a rare encounter with the sonic screwdriver between The Visitation and The TV Movie. As is the case with much of his audio work, he gets a much better crack of the whip than in his TV days.

The companions are a pretty weak pair, with Jason often reduced to comic relief, Crystal to strident fauxmenism (having your female supporting character attack the chauvinist assumptions of the male supporting character is all well and good, but less effective if the female character has been portrayed as entirely superficial, up to and including prioritising her singing career over the actual dead bodies in the room with her.) Both of them also spend a lot of time remarking in clear and specific terms about what everyone can see. The villains are a bit better, with the Daleks and the Cybermen butting heads and a couple of fun mercenary leaders in the gruff Carl and slinky Madame Delilah(4).

There are three songs in the show, of variable quality. Top of the pack is 'Business is Business', Madame Delilah's patter song, if for no other reason than the line 'we always maim to please.' Next is Crystal's nightclub number, 'Strange Attractor'. The first song in the show, it's got a catchy tune but the lyrics are terrible, a salutary warning of the perils of trying to adapt a scientific principle into a 1980s love song based only on its name. Finally, 'Sky High' is notable for being the only one not sung entirely diegetically, and is an eminently disposable not-in-love song about getting snuggly while high on lack of oxygen (I think.)

The Ultimate Adventure is a bizarre gem. I remain unsure if it's any good or not, but I've listened to it many times and it never fails to make me smile. It also comes bundled with a truly fascinating hour of behind the scenes documentaries.

(1) Spercenaries for short(2).
(2) Not really.
(3) He'll probably turn out to be a native Chicano whose accent was garbled through living in New England and France, but he doesn't sound convincing.
(4) A couple of fine, alien-sounding names there.