Sunday, June 26, 2016

Pier Pressure by: Robert Ross directed by: Gary Russell: Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer True

Pier Pressure stars Colin Baker as the Doctor with Roy Hudd as Max Miller, Doug Bradley as Professor Talbot and Maggie Stables as Evelyn.  It was written by Robert Ross, directed by Gary Russell and released in January 2006 by Big Finish Productions.

 

Why do I get the vibe that Pier Pressure may have originally been to be an audio adaptation of the famous Season 23 opener The Nightmare Fair, but was changed vastly because Robert Ross couldn’t get the rights from Graham Williams to do so?  I mean look at the plot of the opening two episodes where a faceless, all-powerful villain is possessing people in Edwardian Brighton, which was originally meant to be Blackpool, and the villains have a grudge against the Doctor for something he did in his past.  It really feels that after Medicinal Purposes didn’t have the best critical response, Robert Ross decided to pay homage to the famous lost story in an attempt to make his story better in the eyes of the fans, but fails to do so.  Ross actually has the problem of making his story worse as a result, because he attempts to make the final two episodes in the darker style seen in Medicinal Purposes which causes another example of tonal whiplash.  The first two parts, while they do have their darker moments are, outside comparisons to The Nightmare Fair, is really just this tribute to the beginning of British television and almost the vaudevillian style of acting seen in those early days.

 

This is seen through the character of Max Miller played by Roy Hudd who along with the villain is the only character who stays as a delight throughout the second half of the story.  Miller is an actor who much like actors of that time were famously pretty impoverished whenever they were between jobs.  He of course cures this poverty by getting extremely drunk which is honestly hilarious in so many ways, but then you realize the main flaw in the character.  He’s a carbon copy of Henry Gordon Jago from The Talons of Weng-Chiang and the Doctor is written as George Litefoot.  That story is a great example of an author who thinks that reminding us of better stories will make us like his story a lot better.  This is just something that cannot be done without the repercussions of making the story seem a lot weaker on the whole.  This has nothing to do with the actors however as Colin Baker and Roy Hudd both are doing their best at making the script a lot better.  Colin Baker does this in every Doctor Who project he is involved in and it feels like his performance is bringing the other actors energies up from the depths of mediocrity especially with Hudd and the villain.

 

The villain of the story is the Indo which is an entity that inhabits people, turning them into their zombie puppets in what I think should be a horror style Doctor Who story, but really falls flat in an attempt to possibly be an homage to the Universal Monster Movies of the 1930s and 1940s.  Their main puppet is Professor Talbot played by Doug Bradley who should go down among the greats of crap Doctor Who villains.  He’s up there with Zaroff from The Underwater Menace, Solded from The Horns of Nimon, the Borad from Timelash and Kroagnon from Paradise Towers in levels of corny enjoyableness in Doctor Who history.  He has this Jekyll and Hyde thing going on which is honestly hilarious to listen to and helps you get through the second half of this story when the plot gets extremely thin.  The plot is basically people are turning into zombies after falling off a pier and into pressurized waters and we have to stop them.  Seriously that’s really all that we have to go on for this story.

 

It’s funny as Robert Ross’ first audio drama has its highest creativity in its plot while some of its characters suffered while here it is almost the opposite except both the plot and characters suffer.  Emma, the first victim, is just that, a victim, and has nothing to do except receive exposition and die and come back to life.  Also the plot ends in a complete deus ex machina.  There is also one point in this story that really bugs me.  To try and create drama Ross has the villain state he has rigged the TARDIS to explode if he tries to take off.  Then two minutes later Evelyn calls this out on how stupid the villain is taking them for as even though it is an all-powerful being it has no idea how the TARDIS works and because it is isomorphic the Indo can’t have it rigged to explode.  Other than the brilliant acting from Maggie Stables, this just highlights how bad the story is.  The holes are so big even the characters inside the story are pointing them out to the audience.

 

To summarize, Pier Pressure has some things that go for it in the tributes to an early form of acting and trying to be a story that tributes classic monster movies, but the story really doesn’t get itself off the ground.  The villain is corny and hokey beyond belief which is so bad it’s good while other characters are ripping off other stories and the plot itself is trying to be a story that never was.  40/100

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