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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.
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 would’ve
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.
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.
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