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Title Summoned by Shadows When was it made? 1993 Who made it? BBV What format was it on? VHS – expensive at first
with a high street release some time later. Nowadays available on DVD with
a few extras. Familiar faces Colin Baker is "The Stranger" and Nicola Bryant is "Miss Brown". Michael Wisher plays and voices several parts which turn out to be aspects of the same character. There is also John Wadmore who will be familiar to anyone who has seen other BBV videos.
The blurb
In a nutshell… On a generic desolate planet, a man dressed in the manner of a tramp settles down for some silent contemplation. He is disturbed by his pretty young companion who isn’t so keen on a bit of the quiet and soulful. She goes off in a huff and finds that this is a world where the poor hang around in a market place waiting to be taken off into slavery. Except, there is a garden party going on nearby and the host keeps his guests happy with his charm and his pistol in more or less equal measures.
Is it any good? Yes it is. I got it in 1993 or 94 and had watched it two or three times prior to this sitting. It never really made sense before. But watching it with one eye on this write up has perhaps made me watch it properly. It is short – barely 35 minutes – so the main criticism of the piece is that the native culture is terribly shallow. It really does seem to consist of peasants who mill around until Michael Wisher’s illustionist hypnotises them into coming to work for him. Their job is to hunt around some derelict buildings looking for circuit boards. We follow one girl as she is seduced by some cheap illusions, captivated by a small pocket mirror and set to work. All she has to do is find one circuit and then she’s free. Easily the most embarrassing bit of business is when she finds said circuit. She and a fellow looker are rummaging through rocks and debris when they suddenly notice the very thing they’ve been looking for just lying on the surface. I know the point of the scene is that these two who should’ve been united in suffering fight over the circuit but it makes everyone look silly when they’ve apparently been searching for this thing for hours and never noticed it is right in front of them. It’s hardly their car keys so they’ve no excuse. Car keys are different – they have magical properties and are only visible at certain times of the day. Probably.
The girl’s other half – a deaf and dumb chap whose overly dramatic miming is an obvious early highlight – goes to find the Stranger believing he can help get her back. Miss Brown on the other hand has wandered into the middle of Michael Wisher’s endless cocktail party and has scrubbed up very nicely. She is joined by the girl – her reward for finding the circuit is a new life in the cocktail set – who also scrubs up quite well. The point of the whole thing of course is that we never appreciate what we’ve got, we let fast talkers and cheap conjurers trick us into wanting more, we turn what should be a collaborative struggle for betterment into a selfish battle for personal gain and when we get what we thought we wanted it turns out to be shallow and not worth having in the first place.
Ok, so the end is a bit rushed with the Stranger putting some circuits into a transmat so Michael Wisher can return to his ship and something sci fi happens to stop him. But it works and that’s all we can ask of an ending. A (fairly) complex story with a simple ending – that’s the magical formula. Too many Doctor Who products have a fairly simple story with a complicated ending so you come away thinking "I enjoyed most of it but the ending was a mess".
Anything for the BBC to object to? Not at all – compare this with BBV’s audio plays which were such obvious licence dodgers and you realise how clever this spin-off is. We – the audience – can guess that this may or may not be the Sixth Doctor taking a break from the universe. There is nothing in the script to say it is or isn’t but it fits. They don’t drop winking hints about past adventures or familiar characters. They just give us Colin Baker as a weary traveller who hasn’t always been the hero people wanted him to be. You could overlook Nicola Bryant’s lack of American accent and place this between seasons 22 and 23. Or simply accept it as a stand-alone drama featuring brand new characters. If only all spin-offs could be as well crafted as this.
Did it help fill the void? It might’ve begun the process of reassessing Colin Baker’s Doctor. Although the character of The Stranger would go on to be given his own back story which proved he wasn’t the Doctor, this more sensitive portrayal would be developed in the official audios. Colin’s Doctor now stands as one of the most popular and might not have needed so many years of rebuilding had he been written with this much skill on television. These BBV films got a fair bit of coverage in DWM at the time so people certainly knew they were there.
Would it work on TV? It would’ve – the budget is fairly small but they do a lot with it. The locations are excellent, the effects are kept to a minimum but the quality is high and it stands alone without the audience having to know who anyone is or why anyone is there. Its target audience isn’t really mainstream telly but UKGold could’ve shown it on a Sunday lunchtime after Doctor Who and it wouldn’t have looked out of place at all.
Production 4/5 Entertainment 3/5 Whoishness 3/5 Overall 4/5
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