The Song of Megaptera (Doctor Who: The Lost Stories 1.07) [Audiobook] (Audio CD) [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Another Doctor who lost story audio. These take stories that were written for the tv show but never got made, and turn them into audio plays. This one features Colin Baker as the Doctor and Nicola Bryant as his companion Peri.

It runs for four episodes, spread over two discs. Episode length is twenty five to thirty minutes approx. Which is a nice change from some of the long two part stories earlier in this series.

The story sees the TARDIS crew caught up in an interstellar whale hunt, as a whaling spaceship tracks down a space whale [It can be said without any spoilers that there is no tie in between this and a recent episode of the tv show]. With an embittered captain on the whaler and something lurking in the bottom of the ship, the Doctor and Peri have a fight on their hands to save the space whale.

And that's before they get closer to the creature itself, and into some strange territory....

This doesn't feel like it's been written for audio or adapted to make it work for the medium. It feels like a pretty straight translation of a tv script. And that's what makes it work quite well. Because by being a standard story for the tv show you know what you're going to get, and thus it zips along quite nicely and pushes all the right buttons. It considers the issues of whaling and makes other points about the economic situation and the like without ever hammering them home. There are several characters who are potential comedy relief and they are genuinely entertaining without ever going over the top.

It does get into some strange territory in the third episode and that plus some shenanigans with time mean you have to pay close attention at points, but audio can create the visuals of these moments in your mind far better than tv ever could, so this comes off okay. Also all the supporting characters do have believable motivations, and the story does move along as a result of those.

Not an outstanding release, but a well paced and rather entertaining one.

There are roughly eighteen minutes of interviews with cast and crew at the end of each disc. This may sound long but the details of the writing process and why this never got to tv are absorbing listening and that makes them zip along. And there's a trailer for the next release in the series at the start of disc one.

With echoes of recent Matt Smith TV story 'The Beast Below' in its central premise of whale hunting amongst the stars, this written but un-broadcast tale from the cancelled 1985 season is not the best in the Big Finish series despite the many rewrites that were apparently needed to get it up to scratch.

The finished story has been likened by some to a Douglas Adams style late 70s effort, and it is fair to say that the play does have shades of Adams' whimsical surrealism. There is also a comedy double act consisting of two fairly inept guards in the mould of Rosencrantz and Guilderstern - or for Doctor Who fans Jago & Litefoot or Garron and Unstoffe - and this Robert Holmes-esque touch beefs the story up no end, providing light relief in what is a fairly dark story. The hubristic Captain Greeg's harvesting of space whales naturally provokes The Doctor's ire, and he and travelling companion Peri are quickly identified as environmental saboteurs. Fortunately there is a distraction in the shape of a murderous beast loose in the bowels of the ship, and the time travellers are soon the least of the captain's worries...

Pat Mills' script is pretty unadventurous to be honest, and neither The Doctor nor Peri have any particularly good dialogue to work with. Colin Baker's 'Sixie' is his usual bumptious self, at one point altering the personality of the on-board computer simply to wind-up the captain, however Peri's hallucinatory scene and the interplay between the two leads just doesn't seem to work as it usually does, and we're left with a competent but not particularly memorable slice of Doctor Who.