Only the Dark Husband might stop a celebration turning to horror, but who is the Dark Husband?
2 Comments
Styre
on May 8, 2016 at 1:08 AM
THE DARK HUSBAND
It seems to be happening more and more often: yet again I must plead American ignorance about an aspect of a Big Finish Doctor Who play. This time it’s about author David Quantick, apparently one of the greatest British comedy writing talents of the past 20 years. Not only haven’t I heard of Quantick, a Wikipedia search reveals that I haven’t heard of anything he’s written. This is, in many ways, a good thing: I can approach his Doctor Who work without any preconceptions, something which I suspect makes it easier to appreciate the work of classic series guest stars like Nicholas Parsons. Unfortunately, the only conclusion I can draw from Quantick’s “The Dark Husband” is that he should go back to what made him famous — it’s absolutely awful.
The worst thing about “The Dark Husband” is that it’s obviously trying to be funny. Silly voices abound all over the place. Stone oracles demand to know who has summoned them — then offer a touchtone menu of choices. The ancient war-ending marriage ceremony has never been performed. Ace has to marry the Doctor. It’s all so broad, unsubtle, and unfunny: the humor doesn’t arise naturally from the situation, it doesn’t relate especially well to the characters, and it’s nowhere near absurd enough to function independently. A comedy release that fails to be funny… this is not an auspicious start.
Fortunately, humor is not the be-all and end-all of Doctor Who. Flat humor has been saved by excellent drama, and vice-versa — sadly, “The Dark Husband” features neither. It took me a while to figure out why everything seemed so familiar, and finally it dawned on me: it’s a riff on “The Dark Crystal!” Of course, this realization didn’t help anything: it’s not a particularly good or insightful riff, but it does feature the plot device of two similarly-named species and a central figure whose name combines the two. Otherwise, it’s a perfectly boring political drama, with the Doctor taking it upon himself to end a seemingly-eternal war. Blink and you’ll miss it, but the Doctor actually carries one of his characteristic master plans into this situation — he’s had it planned out from the beginning. But the situation takes so long to resolve — this play is two hours long for no reason whatsoever — and is so massively uninteresting that you just want everything to end.
Oh, and there’s a casting gimmick: apart from the regulars, and a brief appearance from (again) Katarina Olsson and Sean Connolly, all of the supporting parts are played by Danny Webb! Okay, so he does passable Brian Blessed and Leslie Phillips impressions, and to his credit you can’t tell that he’s doing all three roles — but what on earth was the point? The regular cast, meanwhile, is absolutely horrible: maybe the worst set of performances from the regulars in any Big Finish play. Sylvester McCoy sounds like he has absolutely no idea what’s going on, especially in the first episode — his inflections don’t match the tone of his lines at all. He gets better as things progress — and I’m sure someone will tell me they recorded everything out of order, and prove me wrong — but it just sounds bizarre. Quantick writes Ace as the emotional, impulsive teenager from Dragonfire, instead of the mature adult she’d thankfully become in the BF range — and naturally Sophie Aldred can’t even begin to sound convincing. And when the hell did Hex turn into an erratic, impulsive alcoholic? He’s so out of character that Philip Olivier sounds uncomfortable saying the lines.
Steve Foxon’s sound design is solid, and the score is actually fairly memorable — Nicholas Briggs’s direction cannot save the glacial, boring pace of events, however. I find myself without a lot to say about “The Dark Husband:” it’s slow, it’s boring, and it’s unfunny, with poor acting and questionable casting. Yet I didn’t find myself appalled by any bad decisions, or terrible writing, or anything like that — just stunned that Big Finish, after 105 main-range releases and countless others, would release something that feels so amateurish. Easily one of the five worst releases ever.
Following on from something as thinly stretched and mediocre as The Condemned (which for an Eddie Robson story was unusually uninspired), things are not looking good.
So what’s the nub of why this story is such a failure? Well Lawrence Miles, in one of his usual poison pen blogs, cited writer David Quantick’s personal history of mocking Doctor Who and its ‘sub-human’ fans as proof that he’s a fraud looking to cash in on the show now that it’s lucrative, and heralded the commisioning of this story as a sign of Big Finish going down the pan. But this doesn’t really wash because hardly anyone in the ‘elite’ of fandom doesn’t see themselves as superior from the vantage point of their own pomp, or regard the ‘lesser’ fans with utter contempt. Just read Jon Blum’s GB postings where in a desperate effort to get a writing job on New Who, he plays the role of RTD’s personal bulldog and reminds the fans of their inferiority whenever he hears an opinion he doesn’t like, or try to watch Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat talking about fandom on the confidentials or commentaries without wanting to throw things at the screen.
Fandom is very business minded, moreso because it’s something of an underworld, and it’s all about trampling others to get to the top and treating your audience mean and keeping them keen, and frankly Lawrence’s dig at David Quantick is the epitome of the pot calling the kettle black. Lawrence’s two favourite terms of endearment for the fans are ‘scum’ and ‘vermin’ (mind you, given his caddish conduct with a certain slash fiction writer, Lawrence really should know better than to throw stones when living in a glass house). In-fact the few exceptions to this rule that come to mind are Robert Shearman and Steve Lyons. Like all subcultures that get a bad rap from the mainstream if they get noticed at all, its pecking order is especially vicious and its members have learned to weather the bullying, stigma or ostracism from society by becoming the snobs of their own little elite (though they’ll usually play the victim when someone bites back). Don’t forget that fandom is the only place where these high flyers and superfans have a name that matters, and the only place where they can behave like middle management scum, and many of them know that the comeback of Doctor Who has curtailed their shelf-life.
But such pretension, cynicism and snobbishness generally doesn’t impugn their talents as writers. Just listen to The Fearmonger as an example of the rich creativity that Jon Blum is capable of when he’s not busy taking cheap shots at straw men on GB. Even Russell T. Davies can write well sometimes (Tooth & Claw, Midnight), but when writing for Doctor Who he suffers from spreading himself too thin and he is very resistant to taking risks or doing anything that might compromise the show’s populism, which is where the trashy, dumbed down content and cop-out endings come from. For instance it’s clear that New Earth and Last of the Time Lords should have ended in utter misery rather than quasi messianic rubbish, but would anyone have wanted to watch the show anymore if they had? Maybe, but to Russell it wasn’t worth the risk. At its best, Russell’s writing plays safe in a deceptive way, where a seemingly innocuous moment or line of dialogue catches you far later as being far more poignant and meaningful than you first realised. At worst it means a serious thread of dialogue will suddenly turn flippant in a manner that’s almost brutally jarring and drama bursting. New Who is quite simply one of the most insecure shows in existence and sometimes in its desperation to be popular it seems to honestly have no real respect for itself.
But compare a Russell T Davies story to this (even Partners in Crime) and it’s clear that this has far less substance or heart. The worst Russell episodes are time fillers with tedious inane humour and equally repetitive protracted character material making up the deficit. This isn’t even that. The whole premise of the story is one lame joke stretched over an hour and a half. In other words I’ve seen plenty of Russell T. Davies’ stories that completely squandered their potential, but Planet of the Dead was the only one that shared this story’s complete lack of any poential from the outset.
It’s clear that David is writing this to press fandom’s buttons, filling it with humour and making its first cliffhanger out of the Doctor’s declaration of marriage. To be honest this is nothing new for the fandom elite either, indeed it’s something Paul Cornell did regularly, the most over-earnest and spiteful example of course being Death and the Daleks. It’s that desperate fannish insecurity of not wanting to seem too enthusiastic, by not so much curbing their enthusiasm as giving the object of their enthusiasm a major kicking and treating the old show with pretentious disinterest, and it’s something that’s certainly creeped into the new show itself, with its flippancy and anti-intellectualism.
The fact is the New Who revival has made it more fashionable than ever to talk down and sneer at the classic series as if the New Series has suddenly rendered it obsolete and worthless. When under the producership of Gary Russell, who is as shamelessly fan proud as they come, Big Finish used to be about fighting against the shortcomings of the old series to get straight to the heart of all that the series could and should have been. Now it’s afraid to be seen as being that sad as to bother polishing an embarrassment, unless they can claim to be being ‘ironic’ about it. And so from now on we’ll be seeing an increasing trend in the audio writers adding their own mocking commentary into the script itself whether we want to hear their ‘oh so witty’ remarks spoiling the actual story or not. The worst example will be the way the concept of the Guardians is destroyed in the Key 2 Tme trilogy.
The trouble with how The Dark Husband tries its hand at the same, is that it doesn’t even manage to make us angry because it’s not even half as provocative as it thinks it is. The real problem here is how weak and groansome it all is. No-one believes for a moment that anything life changing is going to happen to the Doctor here. Even The Doctor’s Daughter might have had us more fooled. After the utterly weak marriage cliffhanger, the subsequent twist cliffhanger involving the blue flame is also nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is, and the resolution can be seen a mile off.
Furthermore the opening action scene where the Doctor and his companions have to dodge lazer bolts from a battleship is perfunctory enough without having Hex throwing schoolyard insults at the villains to completely destroy any tension, and from there it makes the world here and any threats contained within damn near impossible to believe in or care about.
There was a time when the Doctor Who audio stories that fitted into the comedy genre were something groundbreaking and special. In The One Doctor, the humour was truly charming because it was imaginative and spontaneous and yet very well structured, and because it parodied our own ‘knowing’, celebrity obsessed media so well. In The Holy Terror, the humour really worked as something life affirming that complimented the story’s existentialism, and was used to really rail against and attack something that deserved ridicule. The same was true of Jubilee which used cruel humour to portray a frightening, vapid world of madness, callousness and ever changing rules and a minefield of etiquette. Likewise The Wormery had a certain heartbreaking sense of each transient beautiful moment of life passing into the ether, beneath its joy de vie humour (in a manner that harks back to when Doctor Who really was about the essence of life, the preciousness of each moment and each decision and the unstoppable momentum and shape of grand historical events, before the 80’s saw the show stagnate and degenerate into soulless, po-faced meandering continuity porn and self-destructive nihilism). The Kingmaker worked for the same reasons that Black Adder did, because it was about how history can be more absurd than fiction, and presenting us with the compelling dynamic of an anti-hero who was shrewder than the times he was living in. And Bang-Bang-A-Boom just generates such wonderful natural frission between its outrageous and larger than life characters. But now Big Finish seems to be doing comedy stories as an ends in themselves, as a cynical requirement rather than for artistic reasons. It’s Big Finish in the wake of New Who’s popularity crying out to be seen as an approachably fun and frivolous team and not like the serious, humourless kind of fans. But now the humour is no longer complimenting the story, so much as completely diluting and sanitising it. It’s the same way that the promising Assassin in the Limelight has its dramatic intrigue and pathos diluted into insignificance by excess smug humour. Likewise this isn’t spontaneous humour, it’s really very tedious and patronising, and far from being life affirming, it brings home the whole falseness of it all.
True there are points where The Dark Husband feels genuinely adventurous which makes it occasionally feel charming. The concept is an impressive one and very Doctor Who at heart, where warring cultures have a ritual of putting down their arms and coming together in celebration once a century before going back to war again, though it’s a tedious journey to get there with time wasted on reading the travel brochure, which recalls the cumbersome days of Season 22 where we’d have to waste time on Tardis bitching scenes and setting up inflight seat belts when we just wanted the damn story to start. Basically the sheer insulting dumbing-down and cynicism of the whole thing means that the charm doesn’t last long.
The final climax feels truly spooky and adds a new magical, elemental feel to this world, only to be spoilt by the smug, knowing resolution which feels like it would have been more in place in a Katy Perry song, and certainly would have been far less tedious for it. A pervading, patronising feel of ‘this’ll do’ runs through the whole thing, and ultimately it’s a story that bears an intriguing listen once, and just might make you laugh once, but you’ll probably never want to hear it again afterwards.
THE DARK HUSBAND
It seems to be happening more and more often: yet again I must plead American ignorance about an aspect of a Big Finish Doctor Who play. This time it’s about author David Quantick, apparently one of the greatest British comedy writing talents of the past 20 years. Not only haven’t I heard of Quantick, a Wikipedia search reveals that I haven’t heard of anything he’s written. This is, in many ways, a good thing: I can approach his Doctor Who work without any preconceptions, something which I suspect makes it easier to appreciate the work of classic series guest stars like Nicholas Parsons. Unfortunately, the only conclusion I can draw from Quantick’s “The Dark Husband” is that he should go back to what made him famous — it’s absolutely awful.
The worst thing about “The Dark Husband” is that it’s obviously trying to be funny. Silly voices abound all over the place. Stone oracles demand to know who has summoned them — then offer a touchtone menu of choices. The ancient war-ending marriage ceremony has never been performed. Ace has to marry the Doctor. It’s all so broad, unsubtle, and unfunny: the humor doesn’t arise naturally from the situation, it doesn’t relate especially well to the characters, and it’s nowhere near absurd enough to function independently. A comedy release that fails to be funny… this is not an auspicious start.
Fortunately, humor is not the be-all and end-all of Doctor Who. Flat humor has been saved by excellent drama, and vice-versa — sadly, “The Dark Husband” features neither. It took me a while to figure out why everything seemed so familiar, and finally it dawned on me: it’s a riff on “The Dark Crystal!” Of course, this realization didn’t help anything: it’s not a particularly good or insightful riff, but it does feature the plot device of two similarly-named species and a central figure whose name combines the two. Otherwise, it’s a perfectly boring political drama, with the Doctor taking it upon himself to end a seemingly-eternal war. Blink and you’ll miss it, but the Doctor actually carries one of his characteristic master plans into this situation — he’s had it planned out from the beginning. But the situation takes so long to resolve — this play is two hours long for no reason whatsoever — and is so massively uninteresting that you just want everything to end.
Oh, and there’s a casting gimmick: apart from the regulars, and a brief appearance from (again) Katarina Olsson and Sean Connolly, all of the supporting parts are played by Danny Webb! Okay, so he does passable Brian Blessed and Leslie Phillips impressions, and to his credit you can’t tell that he’s doing all three roles — but what on earth was the point? The regular cast, meanwhile, is absolutely horrible: maybe the worst set of performances from the regulars in any Big Finish play. Sylvester McCoy sounds like he has absolutely no idea what’s going on, especially in the first episode — his inflections don’t match the tone of his lines at all. He gets better as things progress — and I’m sure someone will tell me they recorded everything out of order, and prove me wrong — but it just sounds bizarre. Quantick writes Ace as the emotional, impulsive teenager from Dragonfire, instead of the mature adult she’d thankfully become in the BF range — and naturally Sophie Aldred can’t even begin to sound convincing. And when the hell did Hex turn into an erratic, impulsive alcoholic? He’s so out of character that Philip Olivier sounds uncomfortable saying the lines.
Steve Foxon’s sound design is solid, and the score is actually fairly memorable — Nicholas Briggs’s direction cannot save the glacial, boring pace of events, however. I find myself without a lot to say about “The Dark Husband:” it’s slow, it’s boring, and it’s unfunny, with poor acting and questionable casting. Yet I didn’t find myself appalled by any bad decisions, or terrible writing, or anything like that — just stunned that Big Finish, after 105 main-range releases and countless others, would release something that feels so amateurish. Easily one of the five worst releases ever.
Don’t waste your money. I want mine back.
2/10
“I’ve had your mum and she was rubbish!”
Following on from something as thinly stretched and mediocre as The Condemned (which for an Eddie Robson story was unusually uninspired), things are not looking good.
So what’s the nub of why this story is such a failure? Well Lawrence Miles, in one of his usual poison pen blogs, cited writer David Quantick’s personal history of mocking Doctor Who and its ‘sub-human’ fans as proof that he’s a fraud looking to cash in on the show now that it’s lucrative, and heralded the commisioning of this story as a sign of Big Finish going down the pan. But this doesn’t really wash because hardly anyone in the ‘elite’ of fandom doesn’t see themselves as superior from the vantage point of their own pomp, or regard the ‘lesser’ fans with utter contempt. Just read Jon Blum’s GB postings where in a desperate effort to get a writing job on New Who, he plays the role of RTD’s personal bulldog and reminds the fans of their inferiority whenever he hears an opinion he doesn’t like, or try to watch Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat talking about fandom on the confidentials or commentaries without wanting to throw things at the screen.
Fandom is very business minded, moreso because it’s something of an underworld, and it’s all about trampling others to get to the top and treating your audience mean and keeping them keen, and frankly Lawrence’s dig at David Quantick is the epitome of the pot calling the kettle black. Lawrence’s two favourite terms of endearment for the fans are ‘scum’ and ‘vermin’ (mind you, given his caddish conduct with a certain slash fiction writer, Lawrence really should know better than to throw stones when living in a glass house). In-fact the few exceptions to this rule that come to mind are Robert Shearman and Steve Lyons. Like all subcultures that get a bad rap from the mainstream if they get noticed at all, its pecking order is especially vicious and its members have learned to weather the bullying, stigma or ostracism from society by becoming the snobs of their own little elite (though they’ll usually play the victim when someone bites back). Don’t forget that fandom is the only place where these high flyers and superfans have a name that matters, and the only place where they can behave like middle management scum, and many of them know that the comeback of Doctor Who has curtailed their shelf-life.
But such pretension, cynicism and snobbishness generally doesn’t impugn their talents as writers. Just listen to The Fearmonger as an example of the rich creativity that Jon Blum is capable of when he’s not busy taking cheap shots at straw men on GB. Even Russell T. Davies can write well sometimes (Tooth & Claw, Midnight), but when writing for Doctor Who he suffers from spreading himself too thin and he is very resistant to taking risks or doing anything that might compromise the show’s populism, which is where the trashy, dumbed down content and cop-out endings come from. For instance it’s clear that New Earth and Last of the Time Lords should have ended in utter misery rather than quasi messianic rubbish, but would anyone have wanted to watch the show anymore if they had? Maybe, but to Russell it wasn’t worth the risk. At its best, Russell’s writing plays safe in a deceptive way, where a seemingly innocuous moment or line of dialogue catches you far later as being far more poignant and meaningful than you first realised. At worst it means a serious thread of dialogue will suddenly turn flippant in a manner that’s almost brutally jarring and drama bursting. New Who is quite simply one of the most insecure shows in existence and sometimes in its desperation to be popular it seems to honestly have no real respect for itself.
But compare a Russell T Davies story to this (even Partners in Crime) and it’s clear that this has far less substance or heart. The worst Russell episodes are time fillers with tedious inane humour and equally repetitive protracted character material making up the deficit. This isn’t even that. The whole premise of the story is one lame joke stretched over an hour and a half. In other words I’ve seen plenty of Russell T. Davies’ stories that completely squandered their potential, but Planet of the Dead was the only one that shared this story’s complete lack of any poential from the outset.
It’s clear that David is writing this to press fandom’s buttons, filling it with humour and making its first cliffhanger out of the Doctor’s declaration of marriage. To be honest this is nothing new for the fandom elite either, indeed it’s something Paul Cornell did regularly, the most over-earnest and spiteful example of course being Death and the Daleks. It’s that desperate fannish insecurity of not wanting to seem too enthusiastic, by not so much curbing their enthusiasm as giving the object of their enthusiasm a major kicking and treating the old show with pretentious disinterest, and it’s something that’s certainly creeped into the new show itself, with its flippancy and anti-intellectualism.
The fact is the New Who revival has made it more fashionable than ever to talk down and sneer at the classic series as if the New Series has suddenly rendered it obsolete and worthless. When under the producership of Gary Russell, who is as shamelessly fan proud as they come, Big Finish used to be about fighting against the shortcomings of the old series to get straight to the heart of all that the series could and should have been. Now it’s afraid to be seen as being that sad as to bother polishing an embarrassment, unless they can claim to be being ‘ironic’ about it. And so from now on we’ll be seeing an increasing trend in the audio writers adding their own mocking commentary into the script itself whether we want to hear their ‘oh so witty’ remarks spoiling the actual story or not. The worst example will be the way the concept of the Guardians is destroyed in the Key 2 Tme trilogy.
The trouble with how The Dark Husband tries its hand at the same, is that it doesn’t even manage to make us angry because it’s not even half as provocative as it thinks it is. The real problem here is how weak and groansome it all is. No-one believes for a moment that anything life changing is going to happen to the Doctor here. Even The Doctor’s Daughter might have had us more fooled. After the utterly weak marriage cliffhanger, the subsequent twist cliffhanger involving the blue flame is also nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is, and the resolution can be seen a mile off.
Furthermore the opening action scene where the Doctor and his companions have to dodge lazer bolts from a battleship is perfunctory enough without having Hex throwing schoolyard insults at the villains to completely destroy any tension, and from there it makes the world here and any threats contained within damn near impossible to believe in or care about.
There was a time when the Doctor Who audio stories that fitted into the comedy genre were something groundbreaking and special. In The One Doctor, the humour was truly charming because it was imaginative and spontaneous and yet very well structured, and because it parodied our own ‘knowing’, celebrity obsessed media so well. In The Holy Terror, the humour really worked as something life affirming that complimented the story’s existentialism, and was used to really rail against and attack something that deserved ridicule. The same was true of Jubilee which used cruel humour to portray a frightening, vapid world of madness, callousness and ever changing rules and a minefield of etiquette. Likewise The Wormery had a certain heartbreaking sense of each transient beautiful moment of life passing into the ether, beneath its joy de vie humour (in a manner that harks back to when Doctor Who really was about the essence of life, the preciousness of each moment and each decision and the unstoppable momentum and shape of grand historical events, before the 80’s saw the show stagnate and degenerate into soulless, po-faced meandering continuity porn and self-destructive nihilism). The Kingmaker worked for the same reasons that Black Adder did, because it was about how history can be more absurd than fiction, and presenting us with the compelling dynamic of an anti-hero who was shrewder than the times he was living in. And Bang-Bang-A-Boom just generates such wonderful natural frission between its outrageous and larger than life characters. But now Big Finish seems to be doing comedy stories as an ends in themselves, as a cynical requirement rather than for artistic reasons. It’s Big Finish in the wake of New Who’s popularity crying out to be seen as an approachably fun and frivolous team and not like the serious, humourless kind of fans. But now the humour is no longer complimenting the story, so much as completely diluting and sanitising it. It’s the same way that the promising Assassin in the Limelight has its dramatic intrigue and pathos diluted into insignificance by excess smug humour. Likewise this isn’t spontaneous humour, it’s really very tedious and patronising, and far from being life affirming, it brings home the whole falseness of it all.
True there are points where The Dark Husband feels genuinely adventurous which makes it occasionally feel charming. The concept is an impressive one and very Doctor Who at heart, where warring cultures have a ritual of putting down their arms and coming together in celebration once a century before going back to war again, though it’s a tedious journey to get there with time wasted on reading the travel brochure, which recalls the cumbersome days of Season 22 where we’d have to waste time on Tardis bitching scenes and setting up inflight seat belts when we just wanted the damn story to start. Basically the sheer insulting dumbing-down and cynicism of the whole thing means that the charm doesn’t last long.
The final climax feels truly spooky and adds a new magical, elemental feel to this world, only to be spoilt by the smug, knowing resolution which feels like it would have been more in place in a Katy Perry song, and certainly would have been far less tedious for it. A pervading, patronising feel of ‘this’ll do’ runs through the whole thing, and ultimately it’s a story that bears an intriguing listen once, and just might make you laugh once, but you’ll probably never want to hear it again afterwards.