Alternative Soundtracks – The Three Doctors!

The Three Doctors had probably the most jokes and one-liners in it, and also had some incredible flukes with our dialogue synchronising with the mouth movements of the original actors. The various Doctors’ characters were simply over-caricatured versions of their real selves, and poor Jo suffered again as the brainless dumb blonde without a clue. By this time we were well into using four-letter words of varying degrees to inject some adult humour into the proceedings, and in this particular story we had the UNIT soldiers using various profanities when faced with the sight of the Gell Guards, and the Brig telling everyone that he didn’t know what the fuck was going on. There was a terrifically successful scene in the corridors of Omega’s palace where Doctor Tyler (whom we had christened ‘Doctor Meeker’ due to his slight similarity to the character from Rentaghost) was telling everyone about his seventies tie and the fact that his grid patterned shirt looked like graph paper.

Each of our alternative versions of Doctor Who stories had a theme running through them, and The Three Doctors was no exception, on this occasion it being the Brig’s quest to get to the pub and drink as much as possible. When we eventually meet Omega, he was portrayed by Andrew as a brash cockney pub landlord who has an answer for everything. His ‘pub’ however, was a bit of an anti-climax, only having one chair in it, although he did claim to have Sky Sports playing on the solitary TV screen in the background. There’s also a shot where we see Omega through a strange piece of the set comprising some pink Perspex inset in a sort of statue, and surrounding the Perspex are some white objects which look very much like huge human teeth. At this point Omega proclaims that this is in fact a blow-up model of Jo’s mouth when she’s screaming. On the subject of Jo’s unique vocal abilities, I remember the first time we watched The Sea Devils and were amused by the fact that the screaming sound that the Sea Devil makes on the beach when the Doctor blows up a nearby landmine was almost identical to the sound of Jo screaming. Consequently, whenever Jo would be seen or heard screaming, whether it was in our alternative story soundtracks or our silly audio stories, Andrew would always scream as combination of the two sounds, much to our amusement.

I recall one Friday or Saturday night a few months after we had completed The Three Doctors, we were at Andrew’s parents’ house late at night after spending the evening at a local pub with his brothers and his Dad, and we decided that we hadn’t quite finished our alcohol consumption for the night. Whilst helping ourselves to another beer or whatever drink Peter had offered us, we suggested that we should watch one of these silly stories as they were perfect material for ‘something amusing to watch when you’ve come home pissed from the pub’. I’m not quite sure how the tapes came to be at his parents’ house, but they were, and we decided that The Three Doctors was the best all-round story to watch. David and Stephen were naturally sceptical about watching one of our strange efforts, as they were not quite as familiar with the stories and characters as Andrew and I were, and thus didn’t find them as amusing. But Peter, who was even less enthusiastic about Doctor Who, made no such objections – most probably because he was in an extremely mellow state at the time. The whole point of this particular recollection is that aside from Andrew and I giggling at The Three Doctors as would be expected, Peter laughed almost constantly all the way through it, much to our amazement. I’m sure it was probably due to the evening’s copious intake of alcohol coupled with the sheer volume of four letter words that we’d used throughout the story, but Andrew and I were, nevertheless, delighted.

Next Episode: Terror of the Zygons!