A long time ago, the 6th Doctor was put on trial by the Time Lords and viewers got a 14 episode epic that introduced the character of the Valeyard – a distillation of the Doctor’s dark side from somewhere between his 12th and final incarnation.
Also, a long time ago, Big Finish had only released 50 stories. The 51st story was called The Wormery and featured Colin Baker, Katy Manning and Maria McErlane and was written by Paul Magrs.
It’s mad to think of how long ago both those things were.
Back then, an audio with a solo 6th Doctor meeting Iris Wildthyme was quite the novelty (on audio, Iris had only appeared in Excelis Dawns at this point). Nowadays with Doctors meeting all manner of time-hopping, larger than life characters, the combination seems less remarkable.
But The Wormery is an unusual story in many ways and not just for it’s combination of the loud and brash Iris with the equally loud and brash Doctor (a contrast to their first audio meeting in Excelis Dawns with Iris joining forces with the 5th Doctor). This, in a way, is far more an Iris story than a Doctor Who story and as well as dipping its toe in the world of musical theatre, it also has one of the strangest aliens in Doctor Who – tequila worms!
The story is vague about it’s dating, merely mentioning the 1930s but A History pinpoints it to 1930. But far more important than historical placement, is the fact that this story is based in the fictional world of the musical Cabaret (and there are strong echoes of another, lesser known musical, She Loves Me, which has a sequence set in a cafe with a similar atmosphere to the club seen in Cabaret. It’s also set in the 1930s, although in Hungary rather than Germany).
Along with my other passions, I’m a massive fan of musical theatre. It all started back when I was 13 and I was taken to see Starlight Express for my birthday. It blew me away and, combined with regular trips to the pantomime every Christmas throughout my childhood and a regularly played LP of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, cemented by love. It’s an expensive interest so I don’t go to the theatre as much as I’d like – and current events in 2020 mean it is physically impossible (around now, I’d be booking up something exciting for my wife’s birthday: last year, it was the truly amazing Everybody’s Talking About Jamie). However, just as I can reel off the name of every actor to play the Doctor, name every companion, identify production codes and list the entire Peter Favison era in story order, I can also recite – word for word – lyrics from numerous musicals.
Cabaret is not one I’ve ever been a huge fan of, though – at least, not the famous Liza Minelli-starring film. I am quite fond, however, of a stage production that was once shown on ITV starring Jane Horrocks and Alan Cumming. It’s bawdy, salacious and moving all at once with the chilling undercurrent of facism lingering in the background.
That last sentence could, to some extent, also describe The Wormery. Iris is bawdy. Bianca – the owner of the club where the Doctor ends up – is silky and alluring. The Doctor is melancholic, reflecting on his trial and discovery of the existence of the Valeyard and the path Germany is setting out on quietly lingers in the background of the story.
I remember enjoying this story on first listen, all those years ago, but this time found myself a little bored by the time the final episode came round. Part of the problem is the limited setting of Bianca’s cabaret club. The revelation that it is actually floating in the vortex is good but quickly means the story is stuck in the same set of rooms for four episodes. Contributing to the claustrophobia is the limited cast of characters – the Doctor, Iris, Bianca, Mickey (a waitress at the club) and Henry (the manager) are the only principal players with a couple of customers bolstering the ranks. A small cast is not necessarily a problem, and Big Finish have good form on producing excellent stories with limited casts. But when a cast is dominated by Katy Manning’s Iris, no one else really gets a chance to get a word in edgeways.
Maria McErlane, who I really only know as the cheeky voice-over of Eurotrash, is good as Bianca but she ends up being a bit one note. Her reveal as basically being Iris’s version of the Valeyard is fun, but doesn’t really go anywhere as it is a deliberate retread of the Doctor’s relationship with the Valeyard. There’s nothing new beyond the initial amusement of the parallel.
Henry, the manager, is stoic (and reminiscent of the head waiter of the cafe in She Loves Me) and then generically evil once his true affiliations are revealed. Mickey, the waitress, is the best character. Effectively becoming the Doctor’s surrogate companion, she also narrates the story in the framing story which involves listening to audio surveillance tapes of events at the club.
This is one of Katy Manning’s earlier outings as Iris. I’m never quite sure about what I think of Iris. I like the concept of the character and have enjoyed her own audio series but often, and especially here, in The Wormery, I find Manning’s performance to be just a bit ‘much’. It’s very broad and quite an assault on the ears. I love Manning but she is very much a ‘character’ in the same way Tom Baker and John Levene have become. Iris sometimes comes across as Manning just with a Northern accent. There isn’t a huge amount of nuance or subtlety to her Iris – at least not in these earlier audios, and especially in this one as there is also a fair bit of ‘drunk’ acting which always, to my ears, comes across as quite forced. I think that actually she becomes better when she has a companion to bounce off, especially when she is paired with David Benson’s Panda. In this story, though, she is just a little too much, especially when put alongside the equally bombastic 6th Doctor and the overly-silky Bianca.
Colin Baker, though, is well-served in this story by a melancholic take on his Doctor which directly picks up on the ramifications of his recent trial. Baker does some good work and his scenes with both McErlane and Manning are the stronger parts of the story – at least for him.
The threat in this story – alien worms inside bottles of tequila – is a strange one for Doctor Who. It’s certainly not a storyline I can see the BBC agreeing to nowadays and, for me, doesn’t quite fit into the world of Doctor Who as well as some weird threats have done in other stories. Part of my issue was the worm’s plans to control all of humanity with their mind powers. Because they achieve this through alcohol I sort of wondered what about those people who don’t drink? I’m one of those people and so it maybe struck me more but a couple of times when the overall plan was being discussed, I sat there thinking – hang on, that wouldn’t work. I know we can say that of many a Doctor Who villain’s plan to take over the world, but here – maybe because I was getting increasingly tired of the characters and setting by the end – I found myself pondering it much more.
Historically, as I have said, this is more based around the ‘Cabaret’ world of 1930 Berlin. However, what we do get is the first mention in our marathon of a group of people who will have a significant impact on upcoming stories – the Nazis. A group of German soldiers are present throughout the story, often being intimidating – but it is not till the final episode that the Doctor explicitly refers to them as Nazis. I’m not sure, though, if this contradicts A History’s 1930 placing as a bit of research suggests the Nazis weren’t really a prominent organisation until a couple of years later. Nevertheless, it’s marks a important milestone in this marathon for them to be referred to be name.
The Wormery, oddly, is a story I remembered enjoying and looked forward to re-hearing. This has been one of those rare occasions where a story has gone down in my estimation rather than, what usually happens, up. I found the characters annoying, the setting limiting and the story just a bit too ‘out there’. There’s individual aspects that appeal, but as a whole, a disappointing revisit.
A History of the Universe 