The Doctor visits Albert Square – again!

Aside from our success with the First Doctor and his companions, we recorded several other stories featuring all Doctors. There was one particular story that featured not only every Doctor and various companions, but both the Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley versions of The Master, The Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, Captain Yates, various characters from Eastenders including Frank Butcher,

Phil Mitchell, Pauline Fowler, Bianca Jackson, Tricky Dicky and Pat Butcher, plus some very unflattering impersonations of Andrew’s Dad Peter, and various other real or fictional characters which we saw fit to persecute in our drunken stupors. Somehow, we even managed to incorporate the character of Private Sponge from Dad’s Army as another subordinate for the Brigadier to shout at, simply because his name amused us! The two Masters were great fun to do, Andrew playing the Anthony Ainley version and myself as Roger Delgado. I have to admit that Andrew’s impersonation of Ainley’s Master was excellent, whereas my attempt at the original Master was merely satisfactory. On one occasion Andrew decided to reproduce the Master’s laugh very enthusiastically, and consequently I then started with the more subtle laugh of Delgado’s Master. Andrew continued with the fake laugh for so long, which also got progressively louder, that we both began to laugh for real which eventually ended up as just silly giggling. We even tried to emulate the original Master’s penchant for disguises, on one occasion having him as Rolf Harris before transforming not particularly seamlessly into the Master and uttering, ‘Do ya know who I am yet?’

The great thing about playing these sorts of characters was that we could only ever remember two or three lines that the ‘real’ versions had actually said on-screen during the television series, so we kept repeating these lines over and over again in amongst our own spontaneous dialogue. It was these familiar phrases, such as Delgado’s, ‘I do hope that violence will not be necessary’ from The Dæmons or Ainley’s, ‘One of your young friends will eliminate the other!’ from Logopolis, that we played repeatedly in ever increasingly OTT fashions that were hilariously funny to us. We had Andrew as the Brigadier, shouting his way through situations and constantly referring to pints of beer and various public houses of one name or another. My version of Sergeant Benton only said one line, which was, ‘Transported? Transported where?’ stolen from The Three Doctors, and poor Captain Yates was portrayed as the most camp member of the armed forces that you could possibly imagine. I can’t remember why we picked on Yates in this fashion, but it was, along with all the other interpretations of our favourite characters, done with purely humorous intention and was not meant to be offensive or unfair. Not.

The reason for the inclusion of the Eastenders characters was because we recorded this just after the Dimensions in Time skit was transmitted during the BBC Children in Need campaign of 1993. By this time we had included so many different characters that we proceeded to rope in anyone else we could do a half-decent impression of, and several others that we couldn’t. This story ended up being called Pub and the Masters (a cunning title, you must agree) and featured our favourite in-joke of them all when the Brigadier shouted to Benton, ‘You man, in here, five rounds rapid!’ before running into the nearest pub.

Next Episode: Crazy Characterisations!