Short Trips: Time Tunnel Reviewed

Peter Webb is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Big Finish’s latest regeneration of the Short Trips format has been hit and miss so far. However, with their third offering, the format seems to be going somewhere.

With the epic finale to the Dark Eyes saga and newly announced UNIT and novel adaptations that are sure to leave any Whovian with no surplus disposable income, the Short Trips range has been somewhat overshadowed. But whilst these adventures are released somewhat in the shadows, it by no means there’s nothing to be found here.

The story is a simple one: the Doctor and UNIT are called over to investigate the death of 200 passengers at a railway station in Sussex. But it’s given your usual Doctor Who twist: it is no mere railway tunnel, but a time tunnel.

Funny story: my 12 year old self came up with the exact same story, except the train was a rollercoaster, and the story’s menace wasn’t frighteningly ambiguous, but a plot by the Master.

Fairs has effectively taken a 6 part serial and removed the subplot. There’s no need for evil Master plots conjured up by a 12 year old – the story carries an ambiguous threat that leaves the listener with just as many questions as there are answers. At points I found myself pretending the iconic theme music had started, to come back in a week for a resolution to the cliffhanger.

Being so used to Big Finish’s full cast efforts, the audiobook and the short story seem somewhat alien to me. But Nigel Fairs is well-versed in working within boundaries, having contributed no less than 5 Companion Chronicles. Short Trips is just as constrained with only 1 voice as opposed to 2, yet limitless in potential. Katy Manning can’t pass for Jon Pertwee or Nicholas Courtney, but she delivers a laudable job, avoiding impressions but capturing a heightened essence of her co-stars from forty years ago: the Doctor’s soft tones, the Brigadier’s militarism, Yates’ friendly conversation; even Sergeant Benton, who here comes across more as Worzel Gummidge than John Levene.

Fairs captures the Pertwee years perfectly; Time Tunnel is the story you forgot you watched in 1972.

Even without a first person narrator to guide the story, Fairs crafts personality into the prose, from Yates’ military background, remembering his father reciting The Tyger as a boy to help him learn the “fearful symmetry” of a neatly placed tie, to Jo’s (albeit anachronistic) favourite band The Hit Parade and her dreaded recollection of O-Levels.

Fairs captures the Pertwee years perfectly. Listening to this story, you’d be fooled into thinking you were listening to a reading of the first couple of chapters of Doctor Who and the Dæmons. Where Flywheel Revolution was experimental, and Little Doctors surely unachievable on a 1968 budget, Time Tunnel is the story you forgot you watched in 1972.

It’s rich in early 1970s Doctor Who: the Doctor as a tinkerer, fiddling with Jo’s cassette player in his UNIT lab to explosive results; Bessie appears, and as does the Brigadier’s casual sexism to Jo. The listener exists within that limitation: a “digital chip” sounds just as futuristic to us as it does to Jo; even the suggestion the deceased passengers were all hippies is somewhat serious! Embedded with references to Peladon, Devil’s End and The Three Doctors, it also mixes in old English folklore and mythology and the Doctor’s not entirely loving relationship with UNIT, who just love to blow up stuff (a la The Silurians.)

I must give credit to Tony Hyrcek-Robinson’s superb sound design. The dry dull voices of most audiobooks I’ve found aren’t here, aided in part by the fact the sound design is complimentary, rather than serving as a replacement for sections of prose or a five minute afterthought downloaded from Freesound. It’s the care and thought put into these releases which truly make them engaging.

Short Trips is unlike anything else Big Finish offer: no 16 hour epics are necessary as context, it’s a half hour of escapism whilst on the bus or doing the washing up, encapsulating a bygone era with nothing else required.

Written by Nigel Fairs, directed by Lisa Bowerman, performed by Katy Manning, Doctor Who: Short Trips 5.03: Time Tunnel is out now and available as a download from Big Finish.

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