The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon: The Nightmare Fair

The Nightmare Fair: Part One (04/01/26)

As was the case about six years ago, I've slipped through a crack in space and time to experience Doctor Who which never made it to the screen. Last time, strikes prevented Shada from being completed, meaning Season 17 never got its six part finale. This time, dissatisfaction in the series by a Sci-Fi-hating upper management led to the entirety of Season 23 being scrapped! Of the six stories commissioned, three had completed (or as near as) scripts with a fourth by former Script Editor Christopher Hamilton Bidmead being close to completion. Robert Holmes' three part story Yellow fever And How To Cure it had draft episodes and planning had gone in to filming it in Singapore but that's as far as things had got. The Season was due to conclude with The Children Of January which, like Holmes' script, has so far never seen the light of day. However, the first three stories - The Nightmare Fair, The Ultimate Evil and Mission To Magnus were all adapted by their respective authors and released as Target novels in 1989/90. Not only that, but the three, alongside Bidmead's script, have been adapted and released as Big Finish Audios, and it is these which I'm using in my attempt to experience the Lost Season as it should have been. Since two of the stories haven't undergone any form of adaptation, I've selected two serials from the same series of Big Finish releases as their replacements. Firstly, in place of Yellow Fever... I have Brian Finch's Leviathan for the simple reason that I stumbled across a second hand copy in a record store about a decade ago and so already own it. For the final serial, I've chosen The Macros partly because it concluded Big Finish's first release of Lost Stories and partly because it was co-written by the incomparable Ingrid Pitt and my curiosity got the better of me.

So, forty years after millions of viewers didn't sit down to watch the exciting new adventures of the Sixth Doctor and Peri, I sit down and listen very carefully to the return of the Celestial Toymaker in Blackpool, of all places!

Written by former Producer Graham Williams, there are echoes of last year's season opener here with the Doctor and Peri wandering around on Earth while nefarious happenings occur nearby. It's a novel idea to have the adventure take place at one of the most popular UK holiday destinations of the 80s, even if their ride on the famed Space Invader rollercoaster did have an air of Blue Peter to it. Meanwhile, a local teenager called Kevin is failing to have his reports of weird goings on after hours at the Pleasure Beach following his brother's disappearance taken seriously by the local police and, having overheard the Doctor talking to Peri about hearing a strange voice calling out to him, has decided to follow them.

Kevin and Peri end up in the same car and separated from the Doctor on another ride, and the Doctor finds himself captured and locked up in a cell. Kevin and Peri are then chased through various rides by men with machine guns, Kevin getting wounded in the arm, then surrounded by mechanical miners in a mining amusement ride. In his cell, the Doctor attempts to contact the prisoner in the next cell with little success until the Toymaker reveals himself and disperses the wall between the cells to show an advancing alien with huge claws.

As I said, there's a similar feel here to Attack Of The Cybermen and I'm sure it would have worked a hell of a lot better on film showing the Doctor and Peri galivanting about the amusement park at the start of its busy season. Williams writes the Doctor and Peri very well together and the bickering of last season is kept to a minimum. The Toymaker's presence is subtly threaded through the first episode with references to Kevin having seen a Mandarin alongside the strange phenomena after hours at the amusement park, but I can't help but be slightly underwhelmed by his reappearance. Again, on screen it may have looked a lot better, but in 1966 it was made clear that the Toymaker inhabited his realm which he enticed unwary travellers to in order for them to play his games. The First Doctor defeated him, collapsing his realm and escaping in the TARDIS with Steven and Dodo, but it was stated (I'm fairly sure) that the Toymaker would continue, rebuild his realm eventually, and pick up where he left off. Now, I understand him being a bit miffed with the Doctor but it seems a bit odd for him to up sticks and set up shop in Blackpool in 1986. Yes, he says that Humans love playing games and, yes, he knows Earth is the Doctor's favourite planet, but this version of the Toymaker seems a little less God-like than before and more a run-of-the-mill villain.

Still, we're only half way there and we have yet to find out what his interest in Kevin is. So, a decent enough, if not epic, opening to the lost 23rd Season, and one that I'm sure would have gone down fairly well.

The Nightmare Fair: Part Two (11/01/26)

Well, that was certainly a bit different to last year's season opener and, to be honest, the conclusion was a bit dull and pedestrian. It got off to an okay start with Kevin having been swapped out for a sort of holographic doppelganger who was to lead Peri to the Toymaker or something, but the Doctor spent almost all of the episode locked up in a cell, first talking to the real Kevin (who'd been caught and joined him), then to a Venusian mechanic and an Android from the adjoining cells who built a helmet to defeat the Toymaker while he was distracted by a computer game he was perfecting.

There was a character called Shardlow, an old man from the 1700s who had lost a game against the Toymaker and had since been his servant, and whose main purpose was to infodump before going off to lose a game of Backgammon off screen and die, but it was all very talky and not very interesting until the last ten minutes. The Toymaker got the Doctor to play his computer game (which he intended to unleash on Humanity and have it ravaged by monsters when each player lost...or something) but I can't help but think that these scenes would have been just as underwhelming and dull on screen in 1986 as they were on audio forty years later.

The Doctor, obviously, won the game and figured out the Toymaker was a lone being from an entirely different universe - hence the laws of this universe not applying to him - and was playing his games because his solitude was so boring. He then trapped the Toymaker in some sort of time loop for eternity when Peri activated the helmet, felt bad about it, reunited Kevin with his younger brother (who the Toymaker had kidnapped because he was a computer game ace) and returned to the fairground with Peri. We didn't really get much explanation as to why the Toymaker wanted to get hold of Kevin (or why, when he did, he just put him in a cell with the Doctor) or why he even had the Venusian and the Android locked up in adjacent cells; in fact, the latter two just seemed to be ignored once the Toymaker was defeated! As entertaining as it was to have a story set in Blackpool and see the return of the Celestial Toymaker, I'm not exactly sure what the point of it was. The current Production Team, who started out so incredibly well with Tom's final season and Peter's first have, in the last few years, seemed evermore determined to mine the show's history for ideas instead of creating new ones. We've had Omega, the Black Guardian, the Master, the Cybermen, the Sea Devils and Silurians, and Sontarans, not to mention the Second Doctor and Jamie return to the show and, frankly, it hasn't always been for the best! What are we going to get next? The Master and the Autons teaming up in Singapore?

It was all very well having the Toymaker latch onto the 80s computer game craze, but it undermined every aspect of his bizarre and creepy original appearance and ended up being fairly disappointing. On the plus side, Colin and Nicola were very good and the bickering has been greatly toned down. Not only that, but the violence wasn't as in-your-face as in many of last year's stories, so we can only hope that Six's second season will continue to see improvements in these areas. So, not an iconic start to the new series, but certainly not a bad one.