Barbara Clegg (1926–2025)

The third season of Big Finish's Doctor Who: The Lost Stories is here. The scars still haven’t healed since Andrew Cartmel inflicted Season 27 on us, but regardless, we soldier on into the future. Or rather, into the past-- the third season takes us back to Season 20 of classic Doctor Who, reuniting the fifth Doctor with Tegan and Nyssa in the gap between Arc of Infinity and Snakedance. The Elite is written by John Dorney, based upon a scrap of an idea by Barbara Clegg. It's not quite show more "authentic" (are these Lost Stories ever?) as Clegg pitched The Elite after Enlightenment, which means it could never have featured Tegan and Nyssa, but on the other hand, it's one of the most authentic-sounding Lost Stories yet.

As Dorney points out in the liner notes, The Elite opens the way many Nathan-Turner/Saward stories did: the Doctor and his companions in a long TARDIS scene, discussing the previous adventure and bickering a bit. For someone like me who considers Seasons 18 through 21 to be one of his favorite periods of Doctor Who, it's a joy to listen to. Dorney writes the fifth Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa perfectly. But he's not above a bit of modern joking at the expense of the era, as we find out why Tegan wore that tube top all season long. There's also a reference to the Big Finish adventure Omega. I feel like I shouldn't like these ahistorical components, but they work here, making the story not just a pastiche of the era it's recreating, but a knowing one. The music all adds to the experience-- moreso than any Lost Story so far, it sounds perfectly like the music of the era. You can imagine Roger Limb or Paddy Kingsland slaving away in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop producing this score. It's the work of Fool Circle Productions (I see what you did there), who were previously responsible for excellent work on Cyberman 2. The sound effects get it, too.

I think that, for once, all of the buttons I want out of a Lost Story have been pressed. The story gets its period just right, but it also does things one better. I would have loved to have seen The Elite on TV in 1983, but I suspect it never could have been this good had it happened then.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF. show less

Has Christopher Marlowe, Aztec relics, a Spanish spy and astral travelling. Unfortunately it also has no regard for astronomical realities and not a lot of coherence, but it's a while before you work that out, probably because Barbara Clegg's outline was developed and implemented by Marc Platt who has yet to find a middle ground between genius and tedium.

this is a very strong start to this sequence, set just after Arc of Infinity, exploring an enclosed totalitarian ideological planetary regime, with a sinister influence behind it all. I had read a DWM review which commented that although the educated listener can guess what is likely to be revealed at the end of Episode 2, the end of Episode 3 comes as a complete surprise, and that turned out to be equally true for me as well. It was rather spooky to listen to scenes of revolutionary mayhem show more in the immediate aftermath of Gaddafi's end and the Tunisian elections. show less

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I had been looking forward to this, having enjoyed the original version very much, and for most of the book I appreciated the little extra bits of detail Clegg brought to the narrative - it's a story where both companions do unusually well in terms of characterisation. Oddly at the very end it completely ran out of steam. The broadcast version's studied but attractive ambiguities over who has actually been thrown off Wrack's ship, and what show more Turlough's choice actually is, completely fail to transfer to the printed page. There are ways of doing this, but Clegg was obviously unable to do more than transcribe what was on the screen. A disappointing end to what had been a promising book. show less