Crazy Characterisations

As far as the role-playing of the Doctors in these audio adventures was concerned, I always played the first, second and third Doctors and Andrew played the remaining incarnations. There was no real reason for this particular allocation as far as I can remember; we just sort of fell into the roles naturally and it seemed to work perfectly from day one. As usual, our method of portraying the Doctors was to caricature them as far as we could; exaggerating each of their mannerisms to the Nth degree. The only problem with this was that the rather bland persona of the fifth Doctor didn’t really have any particular characteristics to his voice or speech intonation apart from a slight notion of being out of breath. Consequently, this aspect was vastly overplayed by Andrew, to the point where he sounded like a dirty old man making obscene phone-calls.

The same ethos applied to the portrayal of companions and all other regular characters from Doctor Who. Again, we shared out the various roles between us. There were two particular female companions that I enjoyed playing, namely Tegan and Mel. For Tegan I think it was probably because my attempt at an Australian accent was just passable, but for Mel it was because I loved the way I could play on the fact that her character was so infuriatingly happy all the time. I remember being particularly pleased in one story, where I had Mel singing as they were on their way somewhere, for no other reason than to annoy the Doctor. Andrew’s portrayal of the sixth Doctor was not exactly subtle at the best of times, so this provoked him into endless shouting at Mel to shut up and threatening to strangle her if she didn’t. Andrew had to contend with all the other female voices, which included Liz Shaw as the most boring person you could ever imagine and Jo Grant as a pea-brained bimbo.

Accents were not Andrew’s strong point, however, as can clearly be heard in his unique interpretation of Jamie. Apart from the problems with the voice, Jamie’s dialogue comprised of strung-together stereotypical Scottish lines such as, ‘By Jimminy, the bagpipes!’, ‘Nay, lad!’, and other such gems. In one story we had the second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria in a supermarket, and Jamie was tasked with writing out a shopping list. The result comprised very imaginatively of a haggis, some bagpipes, a tartan bag and a tin of shortbread. Andrew also played Victoria sounding like an eight-year-old with a suitably childish voice, and at one point he even had her singing her dialogue to the tune of Sandie Shaw’s 1967 Eurovision Song Contest winner Puppet On A String as a natural development of Victoria’s particular method of speech. I also recall a story that featured the fourth Doctor and Leela, where I was playing the Doctor and Andrew my companion. I decided that the moral standards of the story’s content at this point were far too high and so I sought to bring it down into the gutter where it belonged. I used an altered version of a line of dialogue which had been used by Tom Baker in The Leisure Hive (or was it Fang Rock?), the original line having been, ‘That’s the second time that I’ve missed the opening of the Brighton Pavilion!’ Seeing as Leela was always supposed to be the sexy Doctor Who girl with her skimpy animal skin costume, I decided that the Doctor would say, ‘That’s the second time that I’ve missed the opening of Leela’s legs!’ which I can only apologise for in hindsight. Any villains of our own invention who featured in these stories were woefully inadequate as we had nothing to base them on, so consequently we always seemed to fall back on the established characters of the Master, the Rani, etc. to enable the humour to be consistent.

As can be deduced from my recollections of these stories, to say that the actual story lines were extremely bizarre would be a gross understatement. They were never really supposed to make any sense in the first place; it was purely an opportunity for us to be silly. We came up with such ideas as Harry Sullivan going to hospital to have his duffel coat surgically removed, Barbara’s hair being used to shield the TARDIS from a barrage of missiles, and the entire UNIT team, including the Doctor and Jo Grant, attending a regimental dinner in Geneva. I rest my case.

Well that’s our ad-libbed audio stories out of the way, now I’d like to take a slight detour and recall a few other things we got up to as Who fans………….

Next Episode: Conventions – Part One!