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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