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| The Sirens of Time by Nicholas Briggs |
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A multi-Doctor story has both its advantages and disadvantages as the range debut; on the one hand, you have a ready-made event, and there’s always a certain amount of enjoyment to be had in the banter and bickering which goes on when different incarnations of the Doctor meet. On the other hand, though, you do need to let each Doctor have a roughly equal amount of involvement in the action, and there’s also the difficulty of shoehorning the meeting into existing adventures. ‘Sirens’ deals with the problems reasonably well; the structure of three one-episode mini-adventures for each Doctor and then one for the conclusion generally works, particularly in the first half. Similarly, in the same way that the 2005 relaunch emphasised the series’ possibilities by going into the far future and the historical past in the first couple of episodes, setting one episode on an alien jungle planet, one in the North Atlantic in 1915 and one in a futuristic space environment does give a sense of scope and ambition beyond what could have been achieved in the television studio. On the acting front, it’s perhaps unkind to point out that hiring three Doctors for an unproven project does leave the production with the impression that they couldn’t afford much of a supporting cast, although such constraints never hampered the TV series of old and Doctor Who has always made a virtue of improvisation. So in addition to three Doctors settling comfortably back into their old roles, we have Mark Gatiss (who, to his credit, is unrecognisable as the U-Boat captain) and Sarah Mowat playing four roles, although there’s a reason for that which we find out later. If the story has a weakness, it’s that the second half of the third episode going into the fourth become really quite nastily tangled- having introduced the Temperon as (yet another) mysterious and powerful creature of Gallifreyan legend, we then have to deal with the Knights and the Sirens who all seem to have hidden agendas and be double-crossing each other. Or perhaps I just confuse easily. It’s as if the demands of sorting out the mystery while not disturbing established continuity were just a pressure too far and the story as such collapses under the weight. But as a first go with limited resources, in its own way it’s really quite impressive. CD Facts Part 1 - Tracks 1-6 Part 2 - Tracks 7-11 Part 3 - Tracks 1-5 Part 4 - Tracks 6-11
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Looking
at the inlay of my copy of ‘Sirens’, it appears to have been recorded and
released in 1999- and yet it took me a good six years to actually get to
the stage of buying a copy. It’s probably a good a place as any to start
with the reasons why I didn’t- and that basically boils down to the number
of false starts we’d had over the previous decade. The TV movie, the radio
serials (which I’ve never yet listened to all the way through and can’t
imagine that I ever will) and so on had come and gone, but the only
attempt to keep the spirit of Doctor Who alive which had even
halfway succeeded had been the Virgin books, which had only just had the
plug pulled so that BBC Books could do it themselves. There was, to all
intents and purposes, no reason to assume that Big Finish would succeed,
and good reasons (or so it seemed to me at the time) not to be lured into
another false dawn. Even the fact that Forbidden Planet in Leeds started
to stock them (and still keep a good stock to this day) couldn’t persuade
me to do more than dabble. So it was that I avoided going anywhere near
‘The Sirens of Time’ until, having accumulated perhaps a dozen, perhaps
twenty of their output, I decided to go back and do the whole range from
scratch, partly out of curiosity and partly in a mild sense of surprise
that the range from Volume 1 onwards was still available six years on.