Alcohol-inspired Ad-libbed Audio Adventures!

Although we enjoyed making our scripted audio stories, we soon realised that recording stories which were basically ad-libbed piss-takes was much more fun. The first few of these strange stories were also recorded at my mum’s flat but we recorded them late at night whilst Andrew was staying over on a Friday or Saturday night. The fact that my bedroom was next to my mum’s meant that we couldn’t exactly be over enthusiastic in our efforts, and to be honest they ended up as fairly dull affairs with little or no humour. Also, these were the days before we started drinking and so we were stone cold sober at the time – not a great recipe for success you must agree. However, it wasn’t until a few years later when Andrew and I rented a flat together that these crazy recordings became really successful. By this time we were well versed with the consumption of alcohol, and this reduced our inhibitions to the extent that we didn’t care how loud we were when recording them, regardless of the occupants of the flat above.

The first few recordings we made featured all the Doctors and most of the companions, a difficult task in itself with just the two of us providing the voices for all these characters, but we soon discovered that the first Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara were by far the funniest and most successful of the regular characters to imitate, and, quite frankly, to take the piss out of. Consequently, there were more stories featuring only these characters than any of the subsequent Doctors and companions, and I’m sure this is partly due to the strong nature of the interpretation of the characters by the respective original actors in the television series. On a couple of occasions we went a step further by reading from and recording the scripts of the first episodes of An Unearthly Child and The Daleks.

The funniest thing about these recordings was that I attempted to play the Doctor totally straight as Bill Hartnell did, but Andrew (who always played Susan, Ian and Barbara) went to the other extreme and played his characters completely over the top. I remember being annoyed at this at the time as I was enjoying my authentic re-creation of the first Doctor, but I soon realised that this clash of approaches to the situation made it all the more amusing. I seem to remember that on this particular occasion, Andrew had found a tiny bottle of Ouzo (a Greek alcoholic drink which is around 80% proof) under his bed which must have been left by the previous tenants. As it had been found under the bed and was therefore caked in dust and could quite easily have contained something very nasty for all we knew, any sane person would have thrown it away but we decided that we would consume it ourselves, in addition to whatever else we had been drinking beforehand.

This alcohol induced state meant that we were reading the lines incorrectly and putting the wrong emphasis and stresses on the line delivery, much in the same way as Paul Darrow did in Timelash, though of course he was sober at the time. Apparently.

Next Episode: Further First Doctor Frolics!