Dick Sharples

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1848698.html

This is a beautifully produced edition of one of the most notorious lost Doctor Who stories, a Second Doctor adventure scheduled for Season 6, which had reached the point of casting and costume design before the production team pulled the plug on it. There are a number of other known lost stories out there, many produced by Big Finish in the last couple of years, but I think only two other published scripts, both from the very first season - Anthony Coburn's "The Masters of Luxor" (a rather dull robot tale) and Moris Farhi's "Farewell, Great Macedon", about the death of Alexander the Great (accompanied by a single-episode story about an alien dying for love of Barbara, "The Yellow Arc of Fragrance"), which is much better.

Big Finish did an audio version of "The Prison In Space" a year or so ago, and I noted then that it is an absolutely terrible story, and we are very fortunate that it did not survive to blight the history of Who. The Doctor and pals land on a world (which seems to be a future Earth, though I don't think this is anywhere stipulated) which is ruled by women; the Doctor and Jamie are imprisoned in the eponymous space prison, but manage to lead a successful revolt which overthrows female rule; Zoe meanwhile has been brainwashed into feminism, but is cured by a vigorous spanking from Jamie. Little more need be said.

Despite the awfulness of the story, fans of the Troughton era will be very well rewarded by getting the book. We get both Sharples' original outline of the story and his near-final script, which shows some interesting aspects of the production process. We also get some in-depth analysis of how such a dreadful project came so close to being executed, and a review of the script by the former 'Time Team' of DWM. On top of that, we get two versions of Brian Hayles' outline of another lost story, Lords Of The Red Planet (an Ice Warrior story which slightly misfired and which Hayles the replaced with The Seeds of Death), and finally a chronology of what was going on story-wise and cast-wise in the Doctor Who production office between January 1968 and mid-1969, which goes some way to explaining the numerous misfires of Season 6, and indeed makes one glad that things were not in fact worse.

(I'm not sure I can bear to go back to the Big Finish audio, but it seemed to me that the script here was slightly funnier than Simon Guerrier's adaptation. Maybe it's just that my appalled reaction to the basic concept has slightly worn off and I can see the humour more clearly.)

Anyway, well done to Richard Bignell and Nothing at the End of the Lane for making a surprisingly silken purse of this pig's ear.… (meer)

The first story here, Prison in Space, depicts the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe stumbling into a future Earth run by women (usually just called "superiors"), where men ("inferiors") are completely subjugated. Anyone who ever saw Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Angel One" knows that there's no way this can end well, and it doesn't. It's awful. Simon Guerrier says in the extras that when he adapted Sharples's original scripts for audio, he shifted a lot of sexist dialogue from the Doctor to Jamie to keep things a little more tolerable, but that's not really the problem.

The problem is that the narrative itself is sexist. Not only do the women wear skimpy outfits, the narration mentions it quite a bit. Why would they, if gender values truly were reversed? (There's also a "hilarious" bit where Jamie sees some naked women.) All the women in the story are solely characterized by their appearances-- one is "high-strung looking," another is "butch," and Chairman Babs, the ruler of the planet, looks like a toad, a fact we’re told at least three times. (And I lost count of how many times Sergeant Alice-- the butch one-- did something "bullishly.") These women have absolutely no personality beyond these physical appearances, and indeed very little will of their own. As soon as the men start fighting back, the women just give up and lose. Zoe is reconditioned by Chairman Babs to be part of her new society... and then promptly stands around for two episodes. She's saved by Jamie spanking her. Really, you can't make this crap up.

After how much I enjoyed The First Doctor Box Set, this most recent release was a return to the type of stuff we saw in the first series of The Lost Stories. If it wasn't for finally getting to see what Terry Nation's Dalek series would have been like, this would be yet another release that was better off lost...

You can read a longer version of this review on Unreality SF.… (meer)

The Prison in Space was a Second Doctor script, rightly dropped from Season 6. The author was comedy writer Dick Sharples, and it concerns a future Earth where women have taken over. (Like the Two Ronnies' The Worm that Turned, but not as good, if you can imagine that.) Zoe is brainwashed into thinking that women are superior, until - and I am not making this up - Jamie spanks her. (As he threatened on their first meeting.) The eponymous prison is called the OSCE, here meaning the Outer Space Correctional Establishment though I am more familiar with a different interpretation. It would not have been a tragedy if this had stayed in Fraser Hines' attic.

The Destroyers, starring Jean Marsh as Sara Kingdom fighting the Daleks, was Terry Nation's attempt to market a Dalek show to the US. I thought it was basically pretty good, though sorry that the Sara Kingdom character wasn't as tough as she later became in The Daleks' Master Plan and also sorry that it ends on a cliff-hanger which presumably will never now be resolved. A lot of later Dalek stories have done this same sort of thing but it's interesting to see what the first attempt might have sounded like.… (meer)