Day 334 — November 30th 2021
Slipback
Slipback
Perhaps even more than Doctor Who and the Pescatons, Slipback feels like an important contemporary audio inclusion into any Old Testament marathon. Produced for and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 during the gap between Seasons 22 and 23, Slipback is an officially-sanctioned bit of Doctor Who put together with the cooperation of the then-current production team, going so far as having Eric Saward behind the script. I can’t remember if I listened to it when I did my last marathon, but I certainly recognised the first couple of episodes, so I’ve definitely heard those before at the very least. I knew roughly how it ended, too, but actually hearing it felt brand new to me.
I think this probably worked better on original broadcast than it has all in one chunk today. It’s formatted as six ten minute episodes, and they were broadcast two a week on Thursday afternoons as part of a specific block of children’s programmes on the station. It’s notable that the format seems to shift a little every couple of episodes, which probably helped them to feel a little more distinct with a week between them. When listened to back-to-back it has the effect of making each episode — and the overall story — feel a little bit slight.
That’s not to say that there’s nothing in here to enjoy. Indeed, it’s probably some of Saward’s best work for Doctor Who in places. He’s clearly channelling the work of Douglas Adams in several places, most noticeably with the ship’s computer who’s been programmed to sound like a ‘ditzy dame’ and is played with a real ear towards the comedy. I vaguely recall finding the computer annoying when I heard the opening episode before, but this time around I’ve found a lot more to enjoy about it.
The idea at the core of all this — that the computer has accidentally achieved a higher purpose as a result of some programming error, and now wishes to travel back in time to make the universe a better place — feels like the kind of high concept idea Adams would have loved, too. I’ll confess I didn’t see the revelation about the computer’s split personality coming, so that was a nice surprise, although coming late in the day means there’s not a great deal of time to explore the idea.
Elsewhere Saward is still riffing on the kinds of things he enjoys from Robert Holmes’ stories. We get a double act in this one in the form of the policemen Snatch and Sneedle, and in a very Holmes style they’re stickers for authority and the rules, to the point of making the whole thing comically absurd. They’re my favourite part of the story, and I wish we could have spent longer focussing in on them rather than having to split our attention across several characters and subplots, which the story doesn’t really have the time for. My favourite line in the entire script comes when they finally manage to arrest the criminal they’ve been hunting;
Seedle: ‘Now lad, you have the right to remain silent, but I wouldn’t encourage you to do so. Anything you say will be taken down, altered to my satisfaction
and used in a court of law to send you down for a good many years. So
start confessing.’
While there’s some nice turns of phrase and the characters are suitably larger than life enough to really work as distinct creations without the visuals, I can’t help thinking that there’s other areas where this doesn’t quite work. Indeed, there’s a few points which make me wonder how much input John Nathan-Turner had in the creation, because I can’t imagine him having sanctioned some of the material. Take, for example, Peri’s description of the TARDIS landing;
Doctor Who: ‘How odd. I wonder what caused [the TARDIS] to materialise?’
Peri: ‘I don’t know. But she isn’t very happy. At least, the console isn’t. It’s started to wink, flash and grunt like some dirty old man in a park.’
On top of that is the fact that Doctor Who spends the whole episode hungover, and there’s a suggestion that he might still be drunk, given that the computer develops the hiccups when trying to scan his brain. Then there’s various comments which can only be taken as Saward having a bit of a jab at the programme itself, which we know he’d broadly had enough of by this time. There’s Doctor Who complaining about having to wait around for 44 minutes before joining the action (which feels fitting, given how long he and Peri usually have to waste in the TARDIS before joining a story these days) and then there’s what looks to all the world like a criticism of Colin’s casting;
Computer: ‘You are a great disappointment, Doctor.’
Doctor Who: ‘Most people feel that way…’
Overall it feels like something that should be included in a marathon like this, but I’m not sure I’ll be rushing to listen to it again any time soon. 3/10.
