The BF Time Warp 018: The Stones of Venice

[SiHart]

The Doctor and Charley have a watery adventure in Venice...

The Doctor and Charley decide to take a well-deserved break from the monotony of being chased, shot at and generally suffering anti-social behaviour at the hands of others. And so they end up in Venice, well into Charley's future, as the great city prepares to sink beneath the water for the last time...

Which would be a momentous, if rather dispiriting, event to witness in itself. However, the machinations of a love-sick aristocrat, a proud art historian and a rabid High Priest of a really quite dodgy cult combine to make Venice's swansong a night to remember. And then there's the rebellion by the web-footed amphibious underclass, the mystery of a disappearing corpse and the truth behind a curse going back further than curses usually do. The Doctor and Charley are forced to wonder just what they have got themselves involved with this time...

What are your thoughts on the first Paul Magrs BF story?

Si xx

[Rob McCow]

I don't remember it very much, apart from the opening where they're running from someone shooting at them and escape in the TARDIS. That happened in the TV version of Family of Blood.

Also, the set up sounds reeeeeeeemarkably similar to Vampires of Venice. But isn't that always the way?

[Si Hunt]

This season was obviously quite hurriedly assembled and the scripts wern't up to much. The basic premise of this story failed to interest me terribly, and I can remember it being ok, but not great. Forgettable, is the word, much like it's Season 5 copy.

Si.

[SiHart]

I liked this one. Great central performances from Michael Sheard and Elaine Ive-Cameron which help sell the realtionship that has lasted for a long span of years.

I can't really remember much of the details though so it just gets a good from me.

Si xx

[Paul Monk]

I'm quite fond of this one. There's some nice language and its quite engaging. Like Sword, nothing outstanding but good fun. The Doctor is fun in this, the Duke is quietly mad and Miss Lavish is suitably caustic.
And Mark Gatiss is definitely channelling Christopher Lee!

[MacNimon]

Another 3/5 from me. Enjoyable but nothing outstanding. I can't remember many details of the plot here unfortunately, either. However it was really good hearing McGann getting the chance to flesh out his charatcter a bit in these stories.

It certainly doesn't help that I haven't listened to these stories in ages. I'll have to make the effort to give them another go!

[stuartdg]

Great stuff,there's loads of imagery and imagination at play here,and with Paul Magrs at the helm,great dialogue and atmosphere with an added dose of humour,the best McGann of Series 1

[Jon Masters]

3/5 - just doesn't do it for me. Has some great ideas, but like many P Magrs DW stories (IMO) it doesn't do anything good with them - they're just dumped into the story and then never develop. Other trends in his stories turn up here too - huge characters he's obviously more interested in then the story itself, the Doctor doing very little but travel from place to place, and a twist that was obvious a mile off. It's not really helped by some of the performances - even the great Michael Sheard struggles to come across as a real person rather than a whimsical idea.

[Anthony Williams]

This is a bit of a bizarre one. Like Sword of Orion before it, this one wasn't actually written with Paul McGann in mind (in fact, it was actually written with the Fourth Doctor in mind, in Big Finish's original attempt to tempt Tom Baker into working for them). However, unlike it's predecessor, this one actually seems to work for the Eighth Doctor.

There are plenty of good ideas in this play. I love the fact that the Doctor and Charley, fed up of being chased, shot at etc., so decide to take a break. Where they go to Venice, and end up being chased, kidnapped and threatened. The irony of it! Often I find that Paul Magrs' books and scripts can often end up being... well, totally and utterly insane. This one is a bit more tempered, and his crazier tendencies apparently being restrained.

Of course, I love cults and the like, and am generally fascinated by them. So, the whole thing with the cult that arose surrounding their rejection of Estella's supposed suicide is just brilliant for me. I love everything about them, including their crazy plan to convince Orcino that Charley is Estella, reincarnated, in order to prevent the Duke from trying to stop Venice from sinking. Then there's the Gondoliers. The idea that a group of humans can evolve into aquatic creatures is a little strange, but hey... similar mutations happened in The Underwater Menace, so it's not without precedence in Doctor Who.

And then there's the glorious ending to this one, as Estella initially rejects Orcino, before they sacrifice themselves together to ensure that Venice lives on to see the future. Fantastic!

Then, there are the actors in this. It's difficult to believe that this was the first of the four stories in his initial run that McGann recorded. He sounds so wonderfully confident here, and his performance is a real breath of fresh air after the dreary Sword of Orion. Likewise, Charley is served much better here, being given some wonderful stuff to work do. Both of our heroes absolutely shine here.

But what of the guest stars? Well, it was wonderful to once again hear the voice of Michael Sheard in Doctor Who for the final time before his untimely death. And he was fantastic was Orcino - romantic, lethargic and theatrical all in one go. Sheer brilliance.

I never used to rate this story when it came out eleven years ago. But then again, that was at the time that I thought that The Mutant Phase was great. Coming back to this in 2012, I found that I loved it. It just clicked for me, and it now gets a very solid 5/5 from the Williams corner!

[SiHart]

I thought it was written for the 5th Doctor and Nyssa originally? Certainly that was how it was publicised pre-release and pre-announcement of McGann.

[Anthony Williams]

I thought it was written for the 5th Doctor and Nyssa originally? Certainly that was how it was publicised pre-release and pre-announcement of McGann.

I'd read in a number of places that this was originally written for Tom Baker, and that Tom was also sent an early draft of The Holy Terror. I haven't seen it from an official source, so I have no idea how accurate it is?

[Nyder]

Mark Gatiss and Michael Sheard were great in this. They were clearly trying to out-ham each other :-) The story didn't feel zany enough for a Paul Magrs creation, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.