HORROR OF GLAM ROCK

No, don’t laugh at the silly title, which is obviously a play on the 4th Doctor’s televised serial of The Horror of Fang Rock from the 70s.

Going through the endless cable channels with their evermore endless rubbish programmes, I stumbled onto BBC7 (radio) on Sunday evening and they have Doctor Who scheduled at 6pm – so I thought I’d give it a chance.  I recorded it to DVD, ripped the audio, converted to MP3 so I could listen to it on my MP3 player.  (Too busy actually watching Time Team when it was being broadcast and I really hate the idea of “watching” radio.)

Not knowing what to expect, I listened to the adventure yesterday evening.  It’s about 50m long so it’s about the same length as the typical TV episode today.  It turns out to be a Big Finish production – with more producers than modern TV Who for some bizarre reason.

The Doctor is Paul McGann and he has a companion called Lucie Miller.  I guess it had never occured to me to wonder what they’d do about a companion if the 8th Doctor had ever made it to a series.

Anyway, onto the adventure…

Horror of Glam Rock by Paul Magrs sees the Doctor and Lucie land in 1974 at a motorway service station/cafe.  Lucie is from the present day and she considers 1974 to be before her time.  The Doctor waxes lyrical about classic service stations and their humorous ketchup bottles in the shape of tomatoes.  They find a savaged body outside the cafe and this alerts the Doctor that all is not as it seems.  Upon entering the cafe, Lucie remarks that in her time the place would have been shut down due to health and safety (which I thought was a nice subtle jab at today’s nanny state, but maybe that isn’t what they meant).

Inside the cafe are a collection of strange rock rejects (rock in the music sense).  Those inside include a manager (played by Bernard Cribbins) and his latest duo (“The Tomorrow Twins”) have stopped off on the way to a recording of “Top of The Pops” and the last remaming member of a recent split-up band who turns out to be Lucie’s aunt.

Outside the cafe are a group of nasty growling monsters out to tear everything to shreds and eat everyone.  Meanwhile, the male half of the “Tomorrow Twins” is in contact with a mysterious alien species who are using sound waves, via his stylophone, to get him to do their bidding.  The plot is typical of the “aliens find way to invade Earth, want to eat everyone, Doctor stops them by messing with their gateway to Earth” – in this case, putting a collection of household utilties together with the stylophone and Lucie’s MP3 player, he captures them as a sound track on “shuffle”.  Very “Jon Pertwee”..!  But don’t let the ending put you off.

I found the story to be rather refreshing.  It had a classic Who feel to it and was placed in a setting familiar to anyone who’s seen the last adventure of Sapphire & Steel.  Paul McGann isn’t hugely recognisable in the part because you’re expecting him to be running about like a firework on steroids as he was in the TV Movie.  The more subdued performance takes a little getting used to but it’s more “traditional Who” than “modern Who”, and that can only be a good thing.

It turns out that Lucie is a new companion and it’s easy not to confuse her with Rose because she just sounds more intelligent and normal.  When she goes off and does something on her own, you get the feeling that it’s the normal natural thing to do – and that it’s not just someone saying “the companion is better than/equal to the Doctor” which is what we were constantly being spoon-fed with Rose.  In many ways, Lucie comes across as the companion Rose should have been.  You get a feeling that she’s enjoying the adventuring without being OTT about it and, when there’s a brief moment for a chat between the Doctor and Lucie you get the feeling of a growing friendship between two likeminded individuals – not the contrived “romantic relationship/they ‘love’ each other” that the modern TV series kept harping on about.

In short, listing to the 8th Doctor and Lucie is like putting on a pair of comfortable old shoes rather than an uncomfortable leather jacket and trainers.  Nothing in the story seemed contrived, statement-making, or purposefully politically-correct, it just seemed normal.  Maybe the subject matter wasn’t the best in the world and the resolution to the story was a bit silly, but it’s the journey that’s important not the destination.  “The Horror of Glam Rock” could have been made into a TV episode with a budget of tuppence and a silly costume for the monsters, and it would have worked just as well as the audio.  You don’t need a million quid an episode and half a ton of CGI to make good Who – you just need a writer who knows his subject matter and has a good story to tell.

Incidentally, there was no mention of past Doctors, Time Lords, or any of the other “baggage” that modern Who tries so obviously to remove from the show, but that doesn’t affect the enjoyability of this episode – there was just no reason nor opportunity to mention any of it.  Also, the episode ends with a bit of a cliffhanger that seems to be leading to a backstory with a multi-episode arc.  That should be fun to see played out – and I’ll bet it’ll be better done than the “Bad Wolf” alleged-arc.

I look forward to listening to the next episode – a new story – next week, it’s just a bit of a shame that I missed the first ones in this series.