The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Doctor Who Unbound

"I'm a man of action trapped inside the body of a drunken woman!"

"It's a cultural thing! It's what young women do on this planet."

Whenever there's talk of a new lead for Doctor Who, someone almost inevitably suggests that the Doctor should be played by a woman as demonstrated by plenty of actresses being put forward amongst the frenzy of names suggested as potential Doctors for Russell T. Davies' new television series. But what if it actually happened? What sort of difference would the Doctor being female make? Nicholas Briggs' Doctor Who Unbound adventure Exile is a perfect opportunity to discover precisely that as comedienne and novelist Arabella Weir becomes the Doctor in a script which serves as a fitting thematic conclusion to what has been an extremely provocative series, by taking the fantastical nature of Doctor Who and grounding it in the mundane contemporary society.

Briggs' bizarre - and frankly unnecessary - speech reassuring listeners that Sainsbury's car parks don't explode and extolling the virtues of their shortcake biscuits demonstrates that we're in strange new territory, despite the familiarity of the re-enacted scene from The War Games that follows. The combination of portraying the Time Lords as believing themselves all-powerful and yet at the same time ineffectual bickerers alerts the listener that the tone is set firmly to comedy.

Throughout the Doctor Who Unbound series its basis has been to question "what if…?" whether it related to a specific event or a particular character trait. With Exile it could have been very easy to have made the fact that the Doctor is now a woman the crux of the story, but Briggs wisely develops a more interesting plot centred around the idea that the Doctor has escaped the Time Lords and has chosen to hide away to ensure they don't find him. This self-imposed exile involves getting away from everything that made the Doctor who he was and by forcing a regeneration upon himself - and thus changing his gender in the process - then it makes his disguise all the better. The official premise of this story is "what if … the Doctor escaped the justice of the Time Lords?" but because of the intriguing scenario it has a wider scope than that, raising issues such as what if the Doctor could no longer be the Doctor or what if the Doctor had a normal life? It's this contrast between the fantastical and the mundane that Exile is interested in.

When we first meet the Weir Doctor, she isn't living the familiar life of a renegade wanderer and adventurer in space and time, but she's living and working under the assumed identity of Susan Foreman in London. Her old existence was governed by the extraordinary but her new life is governed by the opposite - her mundane job at Sainsbury's, drinking far too much with her friends and then living to regret it the next morning. All in all, it's a very ordinary, anonymous and safe reality and light years away from our expectations of what the Doctor should be doing. Briggs cunningly uses her drinking and subsequent drunkenness to explain how she came to be in this situation through intoxicated conversations with her former self - played with suitable assurance by the author himself in a nice nod to his twenty-odd AudioVisual fan produced stories as the Doctor. Arabella Weir portrays a Doctor who believes the Time Lords are persecuting her for nothing more than being herself and it this fear that by acting in a Doctorish way will result in her capture that has forced her into accepting a routine position.

This constraint upon the Doctor echoes both Auld Mortality and Deadline in that the Doctor-figure is trapped by their reality and longs to escape, but the key difference with Exile is that the Doctor actually chose her reality that binds her. As her frustrations with her empty and monotonous life of binge-drinking grow, we can see why the Doctor was compelled to flee his homeworld and why he knows no home other than the TARDIS. It is a core characteristic of the Doctor's to explore new possibilities and this wanderlust cannot be restricted, as shown here when the Doctor eventually decides that she cannot live without her purpose any longer as it is so fundamental to her being. Briggs misses the opportunity to play up the tragic element in this scenario, going for crude humour instead and while some of this works - such as the Doctor's reaction to the man in the bar's attempts to chat her up - the belching and the vomiting comes across as being very puerile, but it does serve its purpose of emphasising the uncharacteristic nature of the story and the life the Doctor is living perfectly.

Exile intentionally plays against type with its down-to-earth feel and by rooting the story so closely in the mundane Briggs paints the story in a harsh realism, producing much coarser dialogue than usual. When this is combined with how ordinary this particular incarnation of the Doctor seems we can see how far away she has moved from being who she really is and "her Doctoring." But, as in all the Doctor Who Unbound stories - with the possible exception of Sympathy For The Devil - there is a moment of revelation which serves to both illustrate how the 'what if…?' element has impacted upon the Doctor-figure's life but also how it will affect their attitude towards their future. In Exile this comes two-thirds of the way through the play where the Doctor realises that there is more to life than just getting drunk every night and that by hiding away and betraying her true instincts to be out there, amongst the stars, she is destroying herself in the process. This catharsis comes from another meeting with her increasingly paranoid former self and the whole scene where she realises that she is the Doctor and not "some kind of pissed idiot" is a fine moment of drama because it speaks volumes about the Doctor's character. With the power to help people comes the responsibility to use that power responsibly and by getting drunk nightly with Cherrie and Cheese, the Doctor is evading that duty. Given that she believes her actions in helping others were morally justifiable, whatever arbitrary limits the Time Lords may have set, this scene marks the moment where she faces up to who she is and how she can make a difference to the universe at large.

By choosing to craft Exile as a comedy-based story, Briggs has set himself a difficult task as Doctor Who has a terrible habit of very rarely working when it's deliberately trying to be funny with the more successful approach being for the humour to be subservient to the drama. Saying that, Big Finish have set a high standard for comedic Doctor Who with Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman's The One Doctor (2001) sharply spoofing the series' conventions and customs with great effect. But one of the reasons why that play was so successful was the fact that it was played with the actual stars of the show present, which in Unbound territory is a luxury that Briggs doesn't have. He does follow the lead of Roberts and Hickman by making the humour of Exile founded upon the idea of subverting our expectations of the Doctor and who he is. The last place you'd expect the Doctor to be working is in a supermarket and so when Cheese and Cherrie have a desperate situation that only the Doctor can solve at the beginning of the play, the comedy comes from the bathetic realisation that she's only freeing a pound coin from the trolley slot rather than saving the universe from evil from the dawn of time. There are some genuine moments of wit - such as the previous Doctor's list of aliases for the man in the pub - but because Briggs uses the unremarkable situation to make the humour low-brow and crude, much of it comes across as infantile and tinges the story with a rather peculiar silliness, despite it being very appropriate to the way that Briggs has wanted to put the Doctor into a place you wouldn't associate with the character. Possibly the most consistently funny aspect of Exile are the Time Lord double-act who pursue the Doctor to Earth in a vain attempt to bring her to justice. Briggs plays to the stereotype of the Time Lords being ineffectual by making them seem incompetent and illustrating how out of touch with reality they really are but even with these two characters, by the end of the play they too will have subverted the impression they gave initially.

Sadly, the biggest failing with Exile is in its underdeveloped plot, which is surprising given that it's usually the strongest area of Briggs' writing. The meandering pace helps to enforce the humdrum nature of the Doctor's self-imposed exile but the lack of momentum shows the storyline is thin with only two main elements to the plot - the Doctor's realisation of identity and her role mixed in alongside the Time Lords attempt to recapture her. While Briggs brings these together well, ultimately the ambiguous ending, which is very downbeat depending on how it is interpreted and thus continues this seeming perquisite of Unbound for unhappy endings, leaves the listener with a sense of dissatisfaction at the overall insubstantiality. But it could be argued that this is deliberate on Briggs' part, introducing an element of social commentary in that the emptiness of the story mirrors the emptiness of the modern lives people like Cheese and Cherrie lead.

Arabella Weir proves excellent casting for this script as she conveys both the Doctor who has gone native well and more importantly the Doctor she could have been really like if given a chance to grow and develop. It's a shame that we don't get more of her witty and spirited Doctor she portrays during the final phase of the audio and less of the binge-drinking, vomit-faced belcher of the majority because she does show real potential. Briggs' appearance as the previous Doctor is little more than a cameo, despite appearing on the front cover, but as always when Doctors get together - even Unbound ones! - he bickers and argues with Weir brilliantly and by showing the previous Doctor as frustrated with a growing sense of paranoia that forces him to try and show to the Doctor that everything slightly out of the ordinary is an alien conspiracy while she just wants to keep her drink down proves one of Exile's most memorable moments.

The cast is composed almost entirely of Big Finish veterans and this experience shows as they all turn in dependable performances. As the Doctor's friends, Hannah Smith and Jeremy James do ok despite not being entirely convincing when they're acting drunk - which is most of the time. There's something rather sad about the way the Doctor hasn't made any impact upon their lives as Cherrie and Cheese as they leave her at the station and return to the pub to get blind drunk again, but its symptomatic of why the Doctor acts in the way that she does, her need to help where she can. As the two Time Lord agents trailing the Doctor, Toby Longworth and David Tennant are excellent, demonstrating good comic timing and making the most of their roles.

Exile is far too low-key to provide a rousing finale to the Doctor Who Unbound series and the misfiring humour distracts from the interesting idea of a Doctor who is awoken to the responsibilities of actually being the Doctor and thus finding herself again. Although Briggs should be applauded for trying something so radically different to his previous Doctor Who stories, he lacks the flair for comedy that he has for those dark, disturbing dramas that he specialises in and this ultimately undermines the potential of the central premise. Exile is something of an ambitious failure as there are certainly interesting themes exploring Doctor Who from a very different perspective but Briggs secretes them deeply below a surface of crude humour that obfuscates the true intention of the play.