It is safe to say that
most if not all Classic Doctor Who fans know about the lost Season 23 and how
it eventually became The Trial of a Time
Lord. For those who don’t in 1984
John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward had pulled together writers and directors
for Season 23 before Michael Grade had the show put on permanent hiatus. The original Season 23 had an entire layout
of eight stories which would have gone as follows: The Nightmare Fair by: Graham Williams, The Ultimate Evil by: Wally K. Daly, In the Hollows of Time by: Christopher H. Bidmead, Yellow Fever and How to Cure It by:
Robert Holmes, Mission to Magnus by:
Philip Martin, The Children of January
by: Michael Feeney Callan with Leviathan
by: Brian Finch and Point of Entry
by: Barbara Clegg as backups in case something went wrong with another
script. The entire season would be
cancelled with three of the scripts (The
Nightmare Fair, The Ultimate Evil, and Mission
to Magnus) being novelized in 1990.
Fans speculated about
these missing stories for years until 2009 when Big Finish announced The Lost Stories,
a range dedicated to recreating this lost season along with many other lost
stories. They kicked the range off with The Nightmare Fair with John Ainsworth
using the novelization and a copy of the script provided by Williams’s widow. The plot remains mainly in tact with the
Doctor after the events of Revelation of
the Daleks taking Peri to Blackpool for a vacation, but not all is well as
the Celestial Toymaker has been waiting for a final game between the two of
them. The Doctor is forced into playing
a deadly videogame while Peri is stuck playing through other games with
Kevin. It works a lot better than The Celestial Toymaker, mainly because it
actually uses the Doctor and the Toymaker going up against each other to create
a better hero to villain dynamic that was missing in the original serial. The plot however does have one major
problem. The buildup to the reveal of
the Toymaker and the Doctor playing a game takes the entire first episode which
covers the first disc. Now it isn’t bad
that we get some time devoted to developing the Doctor and Peri, but the other
characters really are just as one note as they would be if this was a
television story.
Colin Baker mentioned in
the extras that this was a return to the Doctor as seen in Season 22 and a way
to develop the relationship from an adversary to a friendship between the
Doctor and Peri. This is however not
really how the story feels as the Doctor actually feels like he did at the end
of Revelation of the Daleks, not a
perfect friendship, but definitely the two of them are friends to say the
least. Colin Baker is great as the
Doctor and his personality really works against the Celestial Toymaker as the
Doctor is still very much arrogant. The
Doctor knows that he is going to win as he has won in the past and he plays up
this aspect when he eventually confronts the Toymaker. He just wants to get on with it and not have
to deal with the Toymaker again which is admirable. Nicola Bryant as Peri also gets to have
moments in the spotlight here while she is separated from the Doctor, but these
are just a few moments in a sea of story.
David Bailie makes his debut here as the Celestial Toymaker as Michael
Gough refused to return. As much as I
like Gough as an actor, Bailie gives a much more nuanced performance as the
Toymaker as he has been studying the Earth more and more and has even taken on
an apprentice in the form of the camp Stefan.
Bailie really steals the show as the Toymaker which is honestly great.
John Ainsworth and Jamie
Robertson work really well together at directing the story and placing the
music in a way that it feels very much like a story from the 1980’s. Robertson’s score really feels a lot like
something that Paddy Kingsland would have composed in that period. It really does work well as a score for the
story and takes you right back to the Colin Baker era of Doctor Who.
To summarize, The Nightmare Fair really does deserve
its title as a lost classic story as it would have seen the return of the
Toymaker as a credible threat and a definite continuation of the Doctor and
Peri’s dynamic into the area of friends.
The biggest problem in the story is its pacing which takes way too long
to actually get going. Still a great
opener to the Lost Season 23. 80/100
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