It continues to be Una McCormack week here, and just a reminder that this is because she is the Guest of Honour at this weekend’s Novacon. Back to the Whoniverse again, with two Big Finish plays, one from 2018 and one from 2022.
Red Planets, starring Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor with Bonnie Langford as Mel and Sophie Aldred as Ace, looks at a Britain in 2017 where the Cold War went the other way and people are celebrating the centenary of the October Revolution and the imminent first human landing on Mars; the Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1984 when Western Europe adopted Communism. Meanwhile Ace is in East Berlin in 1961, tangled with a British agent at the jonbar point. It’s quite a complex plot, but well thought through, and the punchline is that the intervention in history comes from quite an unexpected direction.
The main cast, both regulars and guests, are great, but I was not satisfied with the production. I could have done with better cues to indicate which timeline were happen to be in, and there are some oddly long pauses between scenes. It’s also not always clear if the music is diegetic or not. (Though the music by Joe Kraemer is good.) It’s also darker in tone than most Seventh Doctor stories, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. You can get Red Planets here.
F, listening with me in the car, made the point that Doctor Who has hardly ever gone near the real Cold War. He has a point. From the main TV series, the only obvious story is, er, Cold War, set on a Soviet submarine in 1983. In another Capaldi story, Under the Lake / Before the Flood, the military base in was set up to train British soldiers for an invasion of the Soviet in the 1980s, but that’s not hugely relevant to the plot. The worst episode of the Australian K9 series, The Cambridge Spy, is about Soviet intelligence operations in London in 1963. The Russian soldiers in The Curse of Fenric pre-date the Cold War by a few years. (Incidentally, Una McCormack wrote the Black Archive on The Curse of Fenric.)
Someone in the audio commentary makes the sweeping statement that there are few other treatments in any media of what Britain would be like if the Cold War had gone the other way. Actually I can think of some examples, which are both near-future rather than alternate-past because they were written when this appeared an imaginable possibility: Constantine Fizgibbon’s 1960 novel When the Kissing Had to Stop, and the mid-1980s BBC sitcom Comrade Dad. (Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn’t count because Britain is under American rather than Russian domination; The Iron Heel doesn’t count because it pre-dates the Soviet Union.)
The 2022 audio play Torchwood: Infidel Places is also alternate history, of a kind, in that it’s one of a sub-series of Torchwood plays where the main agent for Torchwood during the later Victorian era is, er, Queen Victoria herself, here played by Rowena Cooper. Here she visits Cambridge during the infamous 1897 vote on whether or not women should be allowed to take degrees at the University and finds not only a horrifically misogynist Vice-Chancellor (played by Jon Glover), but also transdimensional demons eating passing academics.
This is the sixth of the seven Torchwood audios featuring Rowena Cooper as Queen Victoria, though the first that I had listened to, and she has clearly got into the stride of it. (She has also made a couple of appearances as Liz Shaw’s mother, Dame Emily Shaw, the Dean of St Matilda’s College, Oxford.) She was 87 when this was recorded, so nine years older than the real Queen Victoria was in 1897, but sounds much more energetic than the real queen would have been. Jade Gordon is also very good as Honora Tapley, the smart young woman who is key to unravelling the mystery. You can get Infidel Places here.
This is alternate history because of course the real Queen Victoria was not in Cambridge fighting transdimensional demons that day – she was in Sheffield opening the new Town Hall as part of her 1897 Diamond Jubilee tour, and, three days before her 78th birthday, was not mobile enough to get out of her carriage in public. However, works of fiction do sometimes include elements that are not true.
It is pretty shocking that Cambridge only allowed women to take degrees in 1948, the last British university to do so, and McCormack rightly displays a bit of sæva indignatio. Between 1904 and 107, Trinity College Dublin famously awarded degrees to hundreds of “steamboat ladies“, women who had passed their Oxbridge exams but could not have that success recognised by their own university.
Big Finish has actually featured the suffragettes (who get a slightly anachronistic mention here; they are normally said to have kicked off in 1903) in two Companion Chronicles, both featuring the First Doctor and Steven Taylor. One of them is Peace in Our Time, also by Una McCormack, which I wrote up earlier this week. The other is The Suffering, by Jacqueline Rayner, which goes in hard on the oppression of the suffragettes by the state.
One more Una McCormack post to go! And one more sleep until Novacon.
