Alternative Soundtracks – Looking Back

I’ve had a thoroughly enjoyable time re-watching these stories recently in order to prepare these posts, laughing myself silly on several occasions. Seeing them again has also made me realise that as much as I made some brilliant contributions to each story, it’s actually Andrew who was much better at it overall than I was. Where I would use the stock line of, ‘Do you know what I’m saying?’ or ‘Do you think so?’ if I couldn’t think of anything else to say at the time, Andrew always seemed to have something ready to say rather than just blurting out any old thing. My lack of inspiration occurred more frequently in our earlier stories when I was less experienced, but as time went on I became much more adept at successfully ad-libbing, and so these mind blanks became few and far between.

If one of us had to make one of our regular trips the toilet during these recordings to empty our lagered bladders, the other had to attend to all the voices for a couple of minutes, and this ended up being even funnier for us both. It was also extremely amusing if either of us happened to have a mouthful of beer at the precise point that whichever character we were playing was saying a line on the screen. Thus, the dialogue at these particular points was, ‘Gurgle, gurgle, splutter’ rather than anything remotely intelligent. I don’t really know why we chose the particular stories that we did, but it was probably because we were both very familiar with them. The fact that we spent so much time creating these bizarre versions of existing Doctor Who stories prompts the question as to why we did them at all. It could be seen that we were blatantly taking the piss out of something that we both loved, and this is certainly true to an extent. But we were good-humoured in our approach to the task, and it’s only the fact that we knew all the stories and characters back-to-front that we were able to make them funny at all. I really think that it’s a huge compliment to the programme that we did what we did, whether it was alternative soundtracks, off-the-cuff audio adventures or original video productions. I often used to wonder what the reaction would be if we somehow got permission to show some of the alternative soundtrack videos at a Doctor Who convention. I’m pretty sure they would have gone down extremely well with all the attendees, but as I imagine it now I realise that they would have to have been shown fairly late at night to avoid upsetting the younger viewers with our prolific use of four letter words and sexual references.

After Andrew and I moved out of the flat and went our separate ways, we had another go at recording our own soundtrack to a story, but it just didn’t work. In theory it shouldn’t have been a problem as all the necessary elements were present, i.e. plenty of alcohol, our silly sense of humour, and the experience of all the previous stories we had successfully completed, but it wasn’t to be. Part of the reason was that we decided to choose a story that we were not very familiar with, in this case Warrior’s Gate; the theory being that the lack of predictability would encourage us to be more spontaneous and therefore more amusing. Unfortunately, the result was the complete opposite as we trundled through the first episode rather unenthusiastically, and after watching it back we decided to call it a day.

Warrior’s Gate happens to be one of those Doctor Who stories that’s quite hard-to-follow and doesn’t actually make much sense, but I’m not sure if that would really had made any difference to us as we were creating our own story line anyway. I think the other reason that we failed was simply because we were both rusty; our previous efforts had all been completed in fairly quick succession, but by this time at least a year had passed since we had finished the last one. Additionally, although Andrew and I were still the best of friends at this time, I think perhaps we’d lost some of the spark that we’d had when living in the same flat and spending a lot of time together. We got to know each other very well during this period, and were often able to anticipate what the other would say during these recordings, so perhaps it was that aspect that was missing on this occasion.

Ah well – another bunch of memories consigned to Cyberspace. I hope you’ve enjoyed them!

Next Episode: Signings!