STORY PLACEMENT

 THIS STORY TAKES

 PLACE BETWEEN THE BIG
 FINISH AUDIO DRAMAS

 "MISSION TO MAGNUS"
 AND "THE HOLLOWS OF

 TIME."

 

 PRODUCTION CODE

 6Y/A/C

 

 WRITTEN BY

 BRIAN & PAUL FINCH

 

 DIRECTED BY

 KEN BENTLEY

 

 RECOMMENDED 

 PURCHASE

 BIG FINISH 'LOST

 STORIES' CD#1.3

 (ISBN 1-84435-446-7)

 RELEASED IN JANUARY

 2010.

 

 BLURB  

 No one lives to old

 age in the village.

 When their Time is

 come, they are taken

 and never seen again.

 That is The Way. And,

 should anyone try to

 break with the order

 of things, the fury of 

 Herne the Hunter is

 unleashed...
 
 When the TARDIS

 ARRIVES NEAR TO

 A castle in this

 mediaeval society,

 the Doctor and Peri

 befriend Gurth, who

 is attempting to flee

 his fate. And Herne

 is closing in...
 
 Why does the baron

 impose the culling?

 What is the secret

 of Zeron? And who

 are the Sentinels of

 the New Dawn?
 
 The answers lie

 within a cave...

 

 PREVIOUS                                                                                  NEXT

 

Leviathan

JANUARY 2010

(2 60-MINUTE EPISODES)

 

 

                                                       

 

 

When I first heard about Big Finish’s plan to bring the season that never was to

the masses I was incredibly excited, but also a little uneasy. Superficially enthralling pitches such as Yellow and Fever and How to Cure It were nowhere to be seen in the planned list

of stories, whereas many of the titles (or variations thereof) had long-since been ground into my brain through incessant re-readings of an old Doctor Who Yearbook, which listed each season’s discarded scripts. Hence my concern: while the likes of The Nightmare Fair and Mission to Magnus had been green-lit and were good to go before the pulling of the plug, others – like Season 22’s Leviathan – weren’t made for different reasons, and I feared that those reasons were because they were, well, rubbish. Happily, I was wrong.

 

The reasons behind the axing of Leviathan remain a mystery to most of us, particularly when one considers that Timelash saw transmission. The most likely explanation is that producing it would have been far too costly for the show’s meagre budget, something that our friends at Big Finish don’t have to worry as much about, working as they do in the altogether less costly medium of sound. Indeed, the story’s very title suggests immense size and power – very apt, I feel, given that it is a visual, visceral feast that would challenge most movie budgets.

 

© Big Finish Productions 2010. No copyright infringement is intended.

Above: Alex Mallinson presents a visual, visceral feast that would challenge most movie budgets...

 

All the same, despite Brian Finch’s story being so heavily reliant on stunning visuals, his son Paul has done an astonishing job in turning it into a first-rate audio drama, especially when one takes into account that he did so within just a couple of weeks. In fact, one could say that the romance of this script’s eleventh hour discovery and production is dramatic in itself.

 

Paul Finch’s script preserves and

perhaps even heightens the bold

imagery dreamt up by his late father.

What were originally conceived as  constrained, studio-bound scenes

have been embroidered and embe-

llished – the monster that wouldve

lurked in the corner of the screen

on television is now mounted on

horseback, rampaging through a

greenwood. The ambitious ‘reveal’ cliffhanger now has an epic feel to it that, with the best will in the world, the 1980s production team could never have engendered.

 

However, Paul can’t take credit for Leviathan’s stimulating premise, which was all of his father’s design. Without wishing to give too much away, the medieval backdrop to this tale isn’t even half the story: Finch’s tale is chock-full of clones, androids, lunatic illuminati and even unscrupulous space pirates. It also features a primal, skull-faced fellow with antlers sprouting from his head, who goes by the name of Herne. Herne the Hunter.

 

Now under normal circumstances, Alex Mallinson’s typically-evocative rendering of this character would have been enough to pique my interest, but as a devotee of the old HTV series Robin of Sherwood – which, ironically, was broadcast opposite Doctor Who during much of Colin Baker’s reign – I was especially fascinated. Robin of Sherwood featured its own version of Herne - a benevolent, shamanic figure who watched over the Robins and occasionally furnished them with magic swords and the like. Yet, for all his munificence, the Horned God of the West gave me childhood nightmares the like of which the Daleks and Cybermen couldn’t even hope to match.

 

© HTV Limited 1983. No copyright infringement is intended.

Above: Michael Praed as Robin of Loxley and John Abineri as Herne the Hunter in Robin of Sherwood (1983)

 

Of course, Herne is a powerful pagan icon woven throughout our culture, first brought to the fore in William Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor, and having appeared in innumerable guises since. Leviathan actively plays upon Herne’s mythological status, the reaping creature that the Doctor and Peri encounter here having been built to stir up ancient, demonic fears within the baron’s serfs. As such John Banks is able to really let rip with an uninhibitedly guttural performance, augmented and distorted by Simon Robinson’s unsettling sound design. I’ve got a horrible feeling that a few childhood demons might be invading my sleep tonight…

 

Furthermore, as in the previous two Lost Stories, Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant both give impressive performances; particularly the former, who is back to the bombastic majesty of his first year in the part. I realise that I’m in the minority here, but I’ve always had a fondness for the brash, insensitive portrayal of this incarnation, and I’m delighted that Big Finish have resisted the urge to tamper with it in these contemporaneous scripts. Leviathan is clearly a Season 22 story presented in true Season 22 style, and that’s exactly what I was looking for when I purchased it.

 

Leviathan also features one hell of a supporting cast, History Boy and Big Finish veteran Jamie Parker standing out most of all as young Wulfric. This point does, however, bring me to my only real complaint about this production - there were simply too many characters for me to be able to keep track of them all; a trait that is made all the more confusing by the actors pulling double and even triple headers in order to keep the production costs down. Every single member of the cast does an astonishing job of setting their respective roles apart from each other but, even so, by the time that I was half-way through Part 2 I found myself having to back-track more than once to try and figure out who speaking in certain scenes, which was a bit of a bind.

 

Overall though, this behemoth of an adventure did little save for astound me, and has gone

a long way to alleviating my anxieties about the quality of the five upcoming Lost Stories. The caprice of a producer, the cost of a set piece, an out-and-out bad call; there are any number of reasons why a Doctor Who script might not have seen the light of day, but whatever force conspired to keep Leviathan from us for twenty-six years has now abated, and I couldn’t be more pleased about it.

 

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2010

 

E.G. Wolverson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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