CC 1.4: The Beautiful People

[Anthony Williams]

The Beautiful People
Starring Lalla Ward

Moving on with the Companion Chronicles, I have arrived at the first Fourth Doctor offering, with Lalla Ward doing her narration fantastically. Of course, Lalla never really left the role behind, having reprised it multiple times for Big Finish prior to recording this. However, here she resumes her persona as a younger Romana, one who is still travelling with the Fourth Doctor and K9 in Season 17 - something that she does flawlessly. Likewise, her versatility is shown in her flawless interpretation of the Fourth Doctor - she booms her way through his lines, putting the emphasis in all the right places to perfectly imitate Tom's inflections. Her spouting off about doughnuts and gift shops... well, I can just hear Tom saying those lines. Absolutely love it!

Of course, part of that is down to the writing of Jonny Morris. Now, while this clearly couldn't fit into Season 17 itself (the subject of obesity and health farms is FAR too 21st Century!), it fits into the spirit of that time perfectly. A number of Douglas Adams-esque in-jokes ensure that this little story really feels like it belongs alongside Creature from the Pit and Nightmare of Eden. It's rather telling that Morris has written for this period of Doctor Who before, and has clearly mastered it.

The story itself isn't anything too special - there's a fairly standard plot of escaping and getting re-captured before escaping again (occasionally reminding me of Frontier in Space, it seemed to happen so often!) However, like the rest of these early Companion Chronicles, the plot isn't the draw of them - the draw is new stories with Doctors that Big Finish were unable to use, for one reason or the other. And this play fills that void marvellously.

Aside from Lalla, we also have Marcia Ashton, playing the wonderfully repellant Karna. Given some superb pieces of dialogue by Jonny Morris, Ashton really shines alongside Romana. There's very little here that doesn't delight!

Unlike the first two Companion Chronicles, but like The Blue Tooth, this does not provide any reason for Romana re-telling this story, but does it need to? While the exposition was nice in Frostfire and Fear of the Daleks, it's rather unnecessary, and this play works just as well without it.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this play - it's absolutely delightful and recaptures an era perfectly. At the worst, some may find this somewhat offensive - although I find it delightfully offensive! This is not quite my favourite of the first season of Companion Chronicles, it is definitely up there!

[SiHart]

The Beautiful People was very Season 17- great fun and a lovely premise for a story- a fat farm that hides a terrible secret. Lalla does a great job reading this, and she is especially good at the cliffhangers, which really sell the urgent terror of the prose so well that I could see very clearly how they would have been realised.
I wasn't sure that dividing it into 4 was very productive either as it seemed jst as it got going you'd be in a cliffhanger and the theme. That got very wearing after every 15 minutes and a waste when there could have been more narration in that time.

While that was fine, I could have done without the little in-jokes- references to Hitch Hikers, Douglas Adams, Richard Dawkins and the reuse of lines from City of Death. They seemed a bit self indulgent to me and it wouldn't have hurt for them not to have been there quite frankly.

[Rob McCow]

OK - good bits first. Lalla Ward reads this wonderfully. She's simply delightful. Also, there's a good joke in it... um... actually there wasn't.

This is a piece of stinking dreck, an awful attempt to capture the 'feel' of Season 17 by being silly and ludicrous. But there's far too much self-consciousness for it to work. And there wasn't nearly enough plot to fill half the story's length. Romana finds out what's going on and is captured by the Villainess who explains her plan. Then she has to escape various lethal traps before the final showdown. It's worked before, but here it's all so perfunctory.

One thing that really bugged me was Romana's initial reaction to the villainess' plan. Taking people's fat away and using it to make soap isn't actually that evil, certainly not 'Abominable'. It's a bit distasteful, certainly. So the writer has to go one step further and make the villain a ludicrous, unbelievable murderer. She's trying to be Helen A from The Happiness Patrol with her 'I just want people to be thin!' line, but there's no sympathy or shades of grey. Yes, I appreciate she was supposed to be an over-the-top character, but the crazy characters in S17 were far more interesting and bizarre than this cliched villainess.

One key illustration: There's a line towards the end where Sibbelius Bing somehow comes to be in charge of the whole Vita Novas operation after the villainess dies. There's no reasoning behind this, but it seems that the writer couldn't be bothered because he was crowbarring in another Douglas Adams quote.

There's a bit of an attempt to make Health Farms scary, taking the 'everyday' and turning it into a killer, but as Romana blunders from one stupid death trap to the next there's no sense of wit being applied. Killer accupuncture! Killer whirlpool! Killer seaweed wrap! Killer tanning booths! Killer-anything-else-I-can-find-in-this-health-brochure! If only it had been as funny as it sounded.

Absolutely bloody ghastly.