The Doctor and Peri have been on holiday, visiting old friend Reverend Foxwell in the sleepy English village of Hollowdean. But why are their memories so hazy?
The Doctor and Peri have been on holiday, visiting old friend Reverend Foxwell in the sleepy English village of Hollowdean. But why are their memories so hazy?
THE LOST STORIES: THE HOLLOWS OF TIME
The fourth lost “season 23” story resurrected by Big Finish came from the pen of former Doctor Who script editor Christopher H. Bidmead, best known for the entropy-themed season 18 and mind-bending stories such as “Logopolis” and “Castrovalva.” The script, “The Hollows of Time,” was adapted by Bidmead himself for audio. While I’m a big fan of season 18 and Bidmead’s scripts in particular, I found his earlier audio “Renaissance of the Daleks” dreadful – and “The Hollows of Time” is unfortunately even worse.
It should be noted that it was always going to be difficult for this story to succeed on audio. It’s an incredibly visual story, relying in large part upon captivating images to grip its audience, and as such only a ground-up rewrite would make it truly suitable for audio. Unfortunately, a ground-up rewrite is contrary to the spirit of the Lost Stories series, and so Bidmead was compelled to alter the script however possible to make it functional for audio. His decision to tell the story through post-adventure narration by the Doctor and Peri in the TARDIS is really quite brilliant, but unfortunately the problem it seeks to solve is merely underscored: every complex action sequence reverts back to narration, and the pattern quickly becomes obvious. It also introduces a degree of ambiguity into the story, as the Doctor claims that his memory has been affected by their recent adventure – but this just makes a confusing story even more so, in the end.
There’s another huge problem with adapting the story to audio, but this one is entirely down to Bidmead himself: the rampant overuse of descriptive dialogue. If I attempted to list each instance of a character describing something in plain sight to other people in the same room, or talking descriptively to him or herself, this review would be 30,000 words long. It’s painfully amateurish audio writing of the sort that breaks any sense of immersion in the fiction. The actors sound distinctly uncomfortable delivering their lines in these instances as well. Generally, when I run into this sort of problem, it’s enough to condemn the play by itself, but “The Hollows of Time” has a bigger problem…
…it’s almost totally incomprehensible. Bidmead is on record, time and again, declaring that Doctor Who is at its best when it draws on real-life scientific principles to underpin its drama. This is an odd position to take, given that his run as script editor saw some of the least scientific stories in the program’s history, but he certainly brings it to bear in this case. The amount of nonsensical technobabble on display in “The Hollows of Time” is staggering. It’s the sort of story where the bad guy constructs a machine, calls it a “quantum gravity” machine, and expects everyone to know exactly what it does and why it’s so dangerous. Does the Doctor know? Sure, it seems like it. Does the audience? Not in the slightest. A thrilling plot could overcome this, but the structure of the play is woeful at best. It’s the sort of thing one would write as a Doctor Who parody: interminable scenes of people standing around in rooms repeating the plot to each other followed by endless dashing up and down (time) corridors. And all of this broken up by narration, just in case anything had the audacity to become clear.
Even the recurring characters suffer. “The Hollows of Time” provoked fan curiosity for years in part because it brings back Bidmead’s own Tractators and their leader, the Gravis, from “Frontios.” Yet here they’re monumentally uninteresting, portrayed entirely by grunts and shuffling sounds and not doing anything unless narrated by the Doctor. The Gravis, a fascinating character in its own right, isn’t allowed a single spoken line – this despite the narration describing several conversations between the Gravis and the Doctor. Why on earth wouldn’t you let the Gravis speak? And then there’s the bad guy, Professor Stream (David Garfield) – look, anyone with the slightest familiarity with this era of Doctor Who knows this is supposed to be the Master. But Big Finish couldn’t get permission to use the character, presumably because “The End of Time” was airing right around the time this was released, so Professor Stream it is. That’s fine, but turning around and playing up the mystery of the character’s identity when you know full well you can’t reveal it is laughably contemptuous of the audience. “The Doctor will discover that not every question has a definitive answer” indeed – why not just write “Don’t expect to enjoy this!” on the back and be done with it?
Even the cast struggles mightily with the material. Colin Baker, of all people, sounds tentative in several scenes, while Peri’s characterization is all over the map. I liked Reverend Foxwell, and Trevor Littledale’s portrayal, and I thought Susan Sheridan was convincing enough as 11-year-old Simon, but then there’s Hywel John, whose turn as “Steel Specs” is – and this is charitable – disastrously unconvincing. Credit to director John Ainsworth for doing his level best to keep this all together, and major props to Nigel Fairs, whose brilliant score evokes “Frontios” itself. Overall, “The Hollows of Time” is a confusing, poorly written mess. Perhaps it was a mistake from the start to adapt this exceedingly visual script to audio, but you have to think a better attempt than this could have been made. As it stands, though, it’s among the worst Big Finish productions of all time, and it’s a good justification of why this story was “lost” in the first place.
Yuck.
1/10