Doctor Who: Fanfare for the Common Man
Apr. 29th, 2014 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakWherein the Doctor saves the Beatles, because of course he does. It's one in a series of Big Finish audio plays done specifically to honor the big 50 years anniversary by connecting them to the year 1963, aka Annus Mirabilis, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP, to use the obvious Larkin quote...and of course the year in which Doctor Who started broadcasting. Doylist and Watsonian Doctor Who/Beatles connections have existed from the start - Beatles producer George Martin worked with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Paul McCartney knew Delia Derbyshire who created the Doctor Who theme, the Beatles themselves show up in a concert clip in a First Doctor adventure (in which, btw, the show accuractely speculates that there'll be a Beatles museum in Liverpool to go to years in the future - which the Doctor's Companion Vicky who is from 200 years into the future has visited, to the shock of Barbara who is from the 1960s), which, given that the Beatles were a current band at the time the episode in question was broadcast must have sounded ridiculous). So a Doctor Who 1963 Beatles themed adventure may have been logical, but the way scriptwriter Eddie Robson pulls it off is genius. It works on so many levels - for starters, both if you're deeply into DW and the Beatles and if you're not that familiar with either. But oh, all the inside gags had me in stitches.
The premise: the Doctor (Five, played by Peter Davison, who is having a blast here) takes Nyssa to see the Beatles in 1963 and to his utter shock finds that nobody has heard of them while the band everyone is starting to go crazy about is called The Common Man and consists of not four but three fellows named Mark, James and Corky. ("The Fab Three doesn't have quite the same ring to it.") Clearly, someone has changed history, and in the course of finding out why and put history back on track, Eddie Robson the scriptwriter checks off various important points of the Beatles saga - Hamburg, Royal Variety concert, Maharishi, split up; while Nyssa for plot reasons ends up in the Hamburg era, the Doctor dashes through the 60s in an effort to first find out what's going on and why and then to stop it. (He does try 1957 first - known to fans like yours truly as the year John met Paul - but it's timelocked by the story's villain, so he can't go there.) The three Common Man bandmembers are obviously modelled on the Beatles (Mark on John, James on Paul, and Corky is a George-and-Ringo amalgan), for which there is an in-story reason, but it also allows the script to use their characters without having to worry about law suits; after all, Mark, James and Corky are fictional. :) The actors, btw, to this German sound great with their Liverpudlian accents, and their music, specifically written for this audio tale, is a neat 60s Britpop pastiche without being on a Beatles level (as the Doctor points out which nearly gets him lynched by The Common Man fans), for which, again, there is an in-story reason. You can tell Eddie Robson really knows his Beatles stuff, btw; for part of the audio, Mark provides a narration which turns out to be his equivalent of the 1970 Lennon Remembers interview, only unlike John, Mark's interviewer calls him out on the inconsistencies (which happen because the Doctor and the villain keep changing the timeline and hence also Mark's memories). Mark and James have a condensed split up era John and Paul argument ("We were in the studio nine hours, take after take after take, and then you said we still hadn't got it right!" versus "Someone had to hold the band together and it sure as hell wasn't you! You couldn't even be bothered to show up when Corky was recording his songs!"); the villain of the tale turns out to beAllen Klein Lenny Krieger, evil American manager extraordinaire (with an American accent that's a bit over the top, but that's okay, he turns out to be not really American); two of the fans get to play larger roles, one of the potentially lethal fanatic variety (named Sadie) and one of the enjoys-is-inspired-but-keeps-her-head-and-own-goals variety (named Rita), and if you haven't noticed they're both called after Beatles songs I'm disappointed. Lastly, the way the show uses the Paul-is-dead nonsense that was cooked up by a bored discjockey in 1969 and became a suburban legend had me rolling on the floor, because it's so clever, both on a Doylist and Watsonian level. (Also it serves the rl extremely creepy PiD crowd right.)
As to what happened in this timeline to the real Beatles: the villain's sinister scheme started by postponing one key historical event, the point at which Britain ended national service, which meant John, Paul and George had to do their time in the army. (Ringo didn't, for health reasons, but he never joined the band, either.) Which, as the Beatles in rl often remarked, would have ended their career before it ever began. Via Rita, the Doctor does find out what became of them in 1963. (John is in a band consisting of "Pete, Chaz and another Pete" - if you're a Beatles fan you know who they are supposed to be, btw, but it's not important to the story - which never went anyhere. Paul gave in to his father's demands to get a proper job though he's writing songs of his own in his spare time - "but he missed his point in time", comments the Doctor. George became an electrician's apprentice. Ringo is drumming for the Hurricanes.) But they're off stage for the rest of the tale, until the very end, when the timeline is back to the original and the Doctor can finally take Nyssa to that promised Beatles concert, so the story ends with the first few chords of an immediately identifiable song. :)
Because the Doctor when dashing about in the 60s has most of his interaction with Mark and James, Nyssa in Hamburg has most of hers with Corky, who is smitten with her (btw, can see both Nyssa/Ringo and Nyssa/George). And here's why the script is really good from a DW point of view: it uses both the fact Nyssa is a scientist (she figures out just who The Common Man really are that way) and her backstory, which I thought the show itself handwaved after Logopolis. At one point, Corky asks Nyssa whether if she's with a time traveller she can't return to her destroyed home planet before said planet's destruction. Nyssa: "No, I couldn't." Corky: "But you said..." Nyssa: "Oh, it's possible. But I couldn't." And the way Sarah Sutton says this second "I couldn't" has so much weight and sadness in it. Speaking of DW continuity, the Doctor mentions Susan a couple of times, and there is an absolutely golden explanation as to just which song Susan was listening to in An Unearthly Child.
In conclusion: two of my fannish loves together in a very enjoyable mix. Get thee to to the Big Finish website and download, gentle reader! With an audio like that, you know you should be glad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. .:)
The premise: the Doctor (Five, played by Peter Davison, who is having a blast here) takes Nyssa to see the Beatles in 1963 and to his utter shock finds that nobody has heard of them while the band everyone is starting to go crazy about is called The Common Man and consists of not four but three fellows named Mark, James and Corky. ("The Fab Three doesn't have quite the same ring to it.") Clearly, someone has changed history, and in the course of finding out why and put history back on track, Eddie Robson the scriptwriter checks off various important points of the Beatles saga - Hamburg, Royal Variety concert, Maharishi, split up; while Nyssa for plot reasons ends up in the Hamburg era, the Doctor dashes through the 60s in an effort to first find out what's going on and why and then to stop it. (He does try 1957 first - known to fans like yours truly as the year John met Paul - but it's timelocked by the story's villain, so he can't go there.) The three Common Man bandmembers are obviously modelled on the Beatles (Mark on John, James on Paul, and Corky is a George-and-Ringo amalgan), for which there is an in-story reason, but it also allows the script to use their characters without having to worry about law suits; after all, Mark, James and Corky are fictional. :) The actors, btw, to this German sound great with their Liverpudlian accents, and their music, specifically written for this audio tale, is a neat 60s Britpop pastiche without being on a Beatles level (as the Doctor points out which nearly gets him lynched by The Common Man fans), for which, again, there is an in-story reason. You can tell Eddie Robson really knows his Beatles stuff, btw; for part of the audio, Mark provides a narration which turns out to be his equivalent of the 1970 Lennon Remembers interview, only unlike John, Mark's interviewer calls him out on the inconsistencies (which happen because the Doctor and the villain keep changing the timeline and hence also Mark's memories). Mark and James have a condensed split up era John and Paul argument ("We were in the studio nine hours, take after take after take, and then you said we still hadn't got it right!" versus "Someone had to hold the band together and it sure as hell wasn't you! You couldn't even be bothered to show up when Corky was recording his songs!"); the villain of the tale turns out to be
As to what happened in this timeline to the real Beatles: the villain's sinister scheme started by postponing one key historical event, the point at which Britain ended national service, which meant John, Paul and George had to do their time in the army. (Ringo didn't, for health reasons, but he never joined the band, either.) Which, as the Beatles in rl often remarked, would have ended their career before it ever began. Via Rita, the Doctor does find out what became of them in 1963. (John is in a band consisting of "Pete, Chaz and another Pete" - if you're a Beatles fan you know who they are supposed to be, btw, but it's not important to the story - which never went anyhere. Paul gave in to his father's demands to get a proper job though he's writing songs of his own in his spare time - "but he missed his point in time", comments the Doctor. George became an electrician's apprentice. Ringo is drumming for the Hurricanes.) But they're off stage for the rest of the tale, until the very end, when the timeline is back to the original and the Doctor can finally take Nyssa to that promised Beatles concert, so the story ends with the first few chords of an immediately identifiable song. :)
Because the Doctor when dashing about in the 60s has most of his interaction with Mark and James, Nyssa in Hamburg has most of hers with Corky, who is smitten with her (btw, can see both Nyssa/Ringo and Nyssa/George). And here's why the script is really good from a DW point of view: it uses both the fact Nyssa is a scientist (she figures out just who The Common Man really are that way) and her backstory, which I thought the show itself handwaved after Logopolis. At one point, Corky asks Nyssa whether if she's with a time traveller she can't return to her destroyed home planet before said planet's destruction. Nyssa: "No, I couldn't." Corky: "But you said..." Nyssa: "Oh, it's possible. But I couldn't." And the way Sarah Sutton says this second "I couldn't" has so much weight and sadness in it. Speaking of DW continuity, the Doctor mentions Susan a couple of times, and there is an absolutely golden explanation as to just which song Susan was listening to in An Unearthly Child.
In conclusion: two of my fannish loves together in a very enjoyable mix. Get thee to to the Big Finish website and download, gentle reader! With an audio like that, you know you should be glad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. .:)
