Doctor Who: Sounds of the Eighth Incumbency, Part 1

Whilst Big Finish’s monthly range of Doctor Who audio dramas had previously shuffled about from Doctor to Doctor for the first year and a bit that they had the licence, they began 2001 with four releases all from the same Doctor. This is because something very special happened: Paul McGann agreed to come back to the role of the Eighth Doctor, having had a blink-and-you’ll-miss it televised tenure in the TV movie, and Big Finish realised that by issuing a clutch of four four-part audio dramas one after another, they could give him the full season in audio he had been denied in television.

(It’s not too late! RTD, please, do the wise thing and give McGann a season! You could do it as a spin-off show – call it the Eighth Doctor Adventures or something. Your broadcast partners at Disney+ are hungry for spin-offs, after all. You’ll need to do it before he’s aged out of the role – Night of the Doctor having set a pretty firm end point – so get on with it already!)

This was perhaps Big Finish’s biggest challenge to date. With their Bernice Summerfield line, they began with audio adaptations of some of the Doctor-less New Adventures novels (from after Virgin lost the rights and retooled things so Benny was the protagonist), giving them a clear model to work with. With Doctor Who, the television show obviously gave them ample precedent to work from; the biggest departure so far had been with the Sixth Doctor audio drams, but even then so the main difference thus far was that they gave him good stories.

With Paul McGann’s depiction of the Eighth Doctor, however, there was much more of a blank slate to work with. Sure, the TV movie happened, but nobody wanted a repeat of that – the fans wouldn’t want more of that, Big Finish’s authors didn’t want to write more of it, and Paul wanted to push past it as firmly as possible. There had, of course, by this point been years worth of Eighth Doctor Adventures novels from BBC Books, and Eighth Doctor comics in Doctor Who Magazine – but the thing about novels and comics is that they don’t require actors.

Big Finish decided – or, perhaps, were obliged to under the terms of their licence – to make their own continuity for the Eighth Doctor audio adventures, giving themselves permission to make the odd nod to the other strands of tie-in media if they wished but not regarding themselves as bound by it. This gave McGann the freedom to likewise ignore all the other tie-in media and perform the Eighth Doctor and interpret the script the way he wanted to. He’s still doing audios with Big Finish to this day, fitting them in around a fairly healthy schedule of movie, television, and stage projects, so he clearly still thinks it’s worth it – so let’s enjoy Paul McGann’s first full season of Doctor Who from a time when, despite oddball experiments like Death Comes To Time and Scream of the Shalka, he was still the incumbent Doctor.

Storm Warning

The Doctor is, as we saw him at the end of the TV movie, doing some reading in the TARDIS library – enjoying former companion/future acquaintance Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, specifically. Suddenly, the TARDIS systems alert him to a nearby kerfuffle in the time vortex: another time ship has crashed and is stuck in a time loop, with extradimensional vortisaurs flitting about it for good measure. His attempt to intervene sees the TARDIS assailed by the beasties, forcing an emergency landing. Meanwhile in 1930, the new British Imperial Airship Scheme’s flagship, the R101, is taking off for Karachi. Among the passengers is Charlotte “Charley” Pollard (India Fisher), who’s pretending to be a boy in order to infiltrate the crew.

Charley fancies herself something of an adventuress, though this is admittedly her first adventure; caught out in her deception, she’s now a fugitive stowaway – just the sort of friend the Doctor likes to make. When the Doctor helps Charley evade pursuit, she’s quite taken with him, not least because of all the historical figures he namedrops; the Doctor, perhaps, sees something of himself in her, what with them both being runaways with romantic souls and a big dose of wanderlust. Perhaps this is the start of a wonderful friendship – or maybe more than that…

But there’s more at stake here than just the Doctor and Charley’s personal liberty and possible sparks of romance. Something sinister is going on aboard the ship, involving an unregistered guest being kept under unusual circumstances – and the vortisaurs have followed the TARDIS out of the time vortex and are harassing the R101. And once the Doctor finds out which ship he’s on, on what date, he’s even more perturbed – for the Doctor remembers that this is the R101’s final flight, which history records ended in disaster and the loss of dozens of lives, though later overshadowed by the Hindenburg. (Less people died on that, but there were cameras onsite capturing the disaster.) It would be an act of cosmological violence to save the ship, but can the Doctor resist the urge to break the laws of time just a little by saving Charley? Perhaps – especially since he has a strong sense that her presence here is already violating the fabric of time…

Doctor Who: The Sonic Salvaging of the Sixth, Part 1

The consensus in Doctor Who fandom seems to be that whilst the Sixth Doctor’s run on television was kind of rough, Colin Baker was really able to turn the character around in the Big Finish audio dramas, where at long last he was given solid material to work with and wasn’t caught up in a power struggle between a script editor and a producer with opposed views on the show’s direction. If we set aside the multi-Doctor oddity The Sirens of Time, Colin Baker’s first Big Finish audio was Whispers of Terror. This paired him with a returning Nicola Bryant in a story which managed to be, if not stellar, at least more consistently enjoyable than much of the material they’d starred in together. Over year 2000, Baker would go on to star in four different Big Finish audios – none of which featured Peri, or for that matter Mel – for Baker would be the first Doctor to perform the role for Big Finish opposite companions he’d never travelled with during the TV show.

In the case of the Sixth Doctor, there’s a compelling creative opportunity set up for this. The timey-wimey nature of The Trial of a Time Lord means that it sets a firm end point for his journeys with Peri, who’d been his companion since prior to his regeneration, but whilst he leaves the courtroom with Mel at the end of the saga, this sets up a bit of a paradox – because Mel comes to the courtroom from some point in her personal timeline after Terror of the Vervoids, which was picked out by the Doctor as a case from his future, involving a companion he hadn’t actually met yet.

The smoothest way to resolve the paradox is to assume that the Sixth Doctor and Mel don’t go directly from The Ultimate Foe to Time and the Rani without any stopovers in between; instead, the Doctor dropped Mel off wherever she’d been plucked away from to attend the courtroom (where she was most likely then picked up by a future version of the Sixth Doctor), and then went off on his own way, eventually encountering Mel for the first time and experiencing Terror of the Vervoids for real instead of as courtroom footage.

This means that, just like the Second Doctor is theorised to have enjoyed an entire “Season 6B” following The War Games in which he undertook tasks for the Celestial Intervention Agency before his forced regeneration was imposed upon him, so too can we imagine any number of “Season 23Bs” enjoyed by the Sixth Doctor; in fact, Season 23B is even better-supported by the TV show itself than Season 6B, because the mere existence of Terror of the Vervoids implies its existence directly, no reasoning outside of the television show needed. We can go further than that, though: sure, sooner or later the Sixth Doctor must meet Mel for the “first” time, but who says he can’t go the long way around to get there? It’s possible to infer all sorts of new friends for him to meet in between – and in doing so, this creates a creative space to explore how the character might have further developed into the softer direction which Trial gave us glimpses of.

Of course, to get the best out of that, you’d need the right companion, and as it happens Big Finish managed to strike gold the first time around…

The Marian Conspiracy

Dr. Evelyn Smythe (Maggie Stables), a middle-aged history professor, is giving a lecture on Elizabeth I’s rise to power and the difficulties she faced during the reign of Queen Mary. Unfortunately, a big-haired buffoon in a clownish coat has shown up with a machine that makes annoying bleeping noises; this proves so disruptive that Evelyn has to cut the lecture short. When she confronts the weirdo in question, he witters about how she’s somehow connected to a temporal nexus point which threatens the integrity of the timeline, and on top of all that insists that John Whiteside Smith – privy councillor to Elizabeth I and ancestor of Evelyn – never existed. To make things even more ridiculous, the stranger makes this claim on the preposterous grounds that he himself frequented Elizabeth’s court, and would have met Whiteside had he existed!

When the weirdo shows up at her home, Evelyn decides to let him see her family records for himself, just to shut him up. Not only is Whiteside missing, but Evelyn’s entire family tree starts to fade away before her very eyes! The stranger explains that some manner of time paradox has ended up affecting her history, and that if it is not resolved she too will pop out of existence. Well, Evelyn has felt a bit under the weather recently, and the disappearance of information from her notes is outright bizarre – perhaps there’s something to the stranger’s claims after all. After all, he is a Doctor…

Doctor Who: Seven’s Sonic Seasons, Part 1

As I’ve previously described, Big Finish announced the arrival of their Doctor Who audio dramas with the oddball multi-Doctor adventure The Sirens of Time, followed by a brace of stories featuring the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors to establish their credentials at telling solo stories featuring the Doctors of the 1980s. Over 1999 and 2000s, they continued to put out their monthly range, expanding each Doctor’s line of audio dramas until they eventually had done the equivalent of a short season of the television show for each of them.

For this article, I’m going to look at their early Seventh Doctor stories, following The Fearmonger. On the one hand, the Seventh Doctor’s brief television run ought to have set him in good stead for adaptation to the audio drama format – his seasons of the show were good enough to act as a showcase for how writers could get the best out of McCoy’s interpretation of the Doctor, but were brief enough to leave all sorts of directions unexplored. On the other hand, the Virgin New Adventures had taken the character in an odd new direction which on the one hand would never have flown on television, but on the other hand had been broadly embraced by the fanbase. This left Big Finish at a crossroads with their Seventh Doctor material: do they mimic the TV show, follow the lead of the New Adventures, or try to find their own way?

The Genocide Machine

The Doctor and Ace have come to Kar-Charrat – a jungle world that is home to a vast library that rivals even the Matrix of Gallifrey for the sheer range of information it contains. Chief Librarian Elgin (Bruce Montague) is only too glad to greet the Doctor, who becomes quite interested in the new “wetwork” technology the library has deployed for data storage. Meanwhile, spacefaring antiquities thief Bev Tarrant (Louise Faulkner) and her team are excavating a nearby ziggurat – said ziggurat being the latest antiquity Bev has been assigned to steal – when they are assailed by violent robotic pepperpots YELL-ING ANG-RI-LY. It’s the Daleks – but what are they doing here?

Penned by Mike Tucker, The Genocide Machine is the first of the loose Dalek Empire series which ran through the Doctor Who monthly range in its early years. In theory it’s a connected arc, but in practice it doesn’t seem like there’s much connecting the arc beyond “here’s this incarnation of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks on Big Finish”; the Dalek Empire title would later be assigned to a Doctor-less spin-off series about the Daleks doing one of their bids for galactic domination and some homebrewed heroes trying to stop them.

Doctor Who: Big Finish’s Big Debut

If you’re looking into Doctor Who tie-in media, the elephant in the room is Big Finish. Much as you can divide televised Doctor Who into the classic series and the revived show, you can divide the expanded Doctor Who canon into two eras. Prior to 1999, you had an era when novels were the biggest deal in expanded media – the Target novelisation series was the only way to experience many classic stories before home media, particularly when it came to lost serials before audience-taped audio had at least partially filled the gaps, and then you had the Virgin New Adventures providing the most prominent trickle of new stories during the wilderness years. Sure, the Pertwee audio adventures were landmark moments, but there was only two of them – for much of the wilderness period, new novels were coming out frequently and formed the most substantial and exciting bit of expanded media.

Everything changed in July 1999, when Big Finish released The Sirens of Time. Big Finish had previously been making audio dramas based on the adventures of Bernice Summerfield – a space archaeologist who had been a companion in the Virgin New Adventures, and who the New Adventures line had reconfigured around after Virgin lost the tie-in novel rights in the wake of the TV movie. Having established themselves, they then pulled off a licensing coup by convincing the BBC to let them produce their own line of full cast Doctor Who audio dramas, featuring whichever classic Doctors wanted to take part. Tom Baker, legendary curmudgeon that he is, wouldn’t return their calls, but Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy were ready to don their question mark-patterned underpants and return to the TARDIS.

The rest, of course, is history. Big Finish have produced a lot of material – their main range ended up putting out at least one Doctor Who story a month for nearly two decades, and if anything their pace has only accelerated in recent years, now that the central range has been abolished and a confusing array of series has taken its place. Their output is simultaneously a sign of their success and a big red flag; they’re now producing an absolutely absurd amount of stuff, to the point where it’s hopeless to even attempt to keep up, and their Doctor Who-related lines alone represent more material than any sensible person would ever want to plough through. Significant creative problems have arisen, some of which are clearly side-effects of the increasing tendency towards shovelware, some of which are not. Elizabeth Sandifer has offered convincing criticisms of the state of present-day Big Finish here and here.

However, it’s one thing to provide a glut of spin-off material in a time when there’s lots of other spin-off stuff being made and we’re regularly getting new Doctor Who on television, and quite another to provide an oasis in the desert in a time when there’s no televised Who on the horizon – and it was through that that Big Finish became beloved and carved out a niche which, thanks in part to a lenient attitude by RTD early on in the revival show, it has largely kept to this day. By virtue of having the Eighth Doctor mention his Big Finish companions in The Night of the Doctor, but not any companions from novels or comics, Grand Moff Steven implicitly elevated Big Finish above other strands of tie-in media. This may be somewhat unfair to the novels and the comics – but at the same time, it is kind of an acknowledgement that, if your main lens for Doctor Who is the television show (and for most people it will be), a good audio drama feels a bit closer to “proper” Doctor Who than a novel or a comic does, especially when it includes Doctors and companions you know and love from the show.

We’re not in the Wilderness Years right now, of course… but we’ve got to wait until May until the show comes back. May! It’s enough to make those four months feel like eighteen. Perhaps it’s time to go back to the roots of Big Finish and start sifting for gold – especially when much of their early material is readily and legitimately available through various channels on a highly reasonable basis. Don’t expect this occasional review series to be anywhere near as rapid as my TV watch-through, mind – or at all completist, since there’s a lot of stuff Big Finish put out I have no interest in. I will leave it to other hands to do a complete overview of Big Finish, and I absolutely reserve the right to skip over material I don’t find appealing, ignore entire product lines, or just plain stop doing these if they stop being fun.

In particular, I am not particularly enthused by the idea of product lines like the Companion Chronicles, which are more like audiobooks with an in-character narrator than audio dramas – akin, perhaps, to the Nest Cottage Chronicles – or audios which cast impersonators as their Doctors, and I am much more interested in those product lines focused on Doctors who I feel got short-changed on television, either because their eras had horrid quality control or because their stint in the show was cut short or both.

The Doctor Who AudioGO Dramas: Doctor In a Nest!

There’s an utterly vast amount of Doctor Who audio material out there – soundtracks of missing episodes with narration added, audiobooks, audio dramas, and the like. The Pescatons and Slipback might have represented false starts, but the Third Doctor audio adventures from the mid-1990s were vital proofs of concept, and once Big Finish got their hands on the licence the floodgates opened.

However, for a good long time there was one thing Big Finish was not able to do: tell a Fourth Doctor story with Tom Baker reprising the role. Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy were involved right from the start, literally: The Sirens of Time, the first Big Finish Doctor Who story, is a multi-Doctor tale including all three of them. Paul McGann hopped onboard with Storm Warning and has been a stalwart of their range ever since. Yet for a very, very long time, Tom Baker wouldn’t play ball.

Part of this seems to have been down to a reasoned decision to stay away from the role, and in Baker’s case this may be motivated by more than the usual worries about becoming typecast in the role. As the longest-serving and most widely-recognised classic Doctor, and the favourite of a great many, it’s not as though there was any great reserve of untapped potential to delve into. Unlike Davison or Colin Baker, nobody’s saying “What would have happened if Tom Baker had been given decent scripts during his time on TV?”, since his era is generally considered a peak on that front. Unlike Sylvester McCoy, nobody’s asking “What would have happened if that long-term plan for a darker direction had been fully enacted with Tom Baker’s Doctor?”, because there was no long-term plan to make him a mysterious manipulator, no Fourth Doctor equivalent of the Cartmel Masterplan. Tom, quite simply, had nothing to prove by coming back to Doctor Who, and potentially quite a lot to lose if he got involved in a tie-in project and it turned out to utterly stink.

Part of this, on the other hand, may have come down to Big Finish simply struggling to negotiate terms with Tom, who’s infamously prickly. It’s particularly notable that even when he did soften his stance on taking on audio roles as the Fourth Doctor and made his much-anticipated return, Tom Baker didn’t actually do so with Big Finish. He would eventually join them, and has been fairly prolific there ever since, but rather than jumping on the same bandwagon as the other classic Doctors he took a road less travelled.

That road took him through the Nest Cottage Chronicles, a series of some fifteen hour-long audio dramas consisting of three seasons of five episodes each – Hornets’ Nest, Demon Quest, and Serpent’s Crest. Penned by Paul Magrs, these were recorded for and released by AudioGO, a company which took on the BBC Audio line (formerly the BBC Radio Collection) for about three to four years until they collapsed in 2013 and the BBC took back the rights. Amazingly, the entire collection can be dipped into for the price of one shiny, eminently refundable Audible credit, so I decided to check it out to see whether it represents a rich, untapped alternate approach to making Doctor Who audio dramas, or a rather more elaborate take on the “audiobook with a few small dramatised scenes” approach of The Pescatons. (Spoiler: it’s the latter, but that’s being over-simplistic.)

Doctor Who: The Slippery, Fishy Early Audio Adventures

Doctor Who audio dramas are pretty much a cottage industry at this point, with Big Finish churning them out in outright ridiculous quantities. As I’ve previously explored, Jon Pertwee and the core of the season 11 gang would team up in the 1990s to pioneer the concept of audio adventures starring past Doctors, which has been Big Finish’s bread and butter ever since – a corner of official Who output which, by virtue of being kept away from the newest Doctors, is obliged to forever carve out a corner for itself which is distinct from what the television show is currently doing.

However, there were a few previous times when presently-serving Doctors were called in to produce audio adventures during the run of the classic series. In the 1960s, Peter Cushing was involved in an attempt to make a Doctor Who radio series which would have had a parallel continuity to the television show (and might or might not have been in continuity with the Amicus adaptations of Dalek stories he’d appeared in as his version of the Doctor), but only a pilot episode was recorded and, after the BBC scrapped it, the recording seems to have fallen into obscurity and may well no longer exist. In subsequent decades, however, two audio adventures of significant did emerge. One of them smells of fish. One of them smells of Saward…

The Pescatons

The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive back on present-day Earth to discover strange things going on at the mouth of the Thames – a meteorite was observed falling into the sea just off the coast, and repeated expeditions to retrieve it have vanished without trace. Eventually, the Doctor and Sarah Jane discover the truth: the meteorite was an advance scout, and an invasion of Earth by the fish-like Pescatons is imminent!

Released as a single LP in the gap between seasons 13 and 14, this is only barely an audio drama; great swathes of it are narrated by Tom Baker in-character as the Fourth Doctor, and the only segments that are actually dramatised as such are a few conversations between him and Sarah Jane and a chat between the Doctor and Zor (Bill Mitchell), leader of the Pescatons.

Performed, then, by Baker, Sladen, Mitchell, and some sound effects, some compromises become necessary. Any scene involving conversations with someone other than the Doctor and Sarah Jane is summarised rather than played out, and occasionally these summaries are brief to the point of being bullet points. A glaring example happens early on: one moment the Doctor and Sarah Jane are fleeing a Pescaton on a lonely beach, the next we’re told about how they ended up discovering the backstory about what went on from this “Professor Emerson” person without being told how the Doctor and Sarah Jane actually got away from the Pescaton or found Professor Emerson.

The Third Doctor Radio Serials: Doctor’s Swansong

Barry Letts was by any measure a pretty important name in the list of Doctor Who producers – overseeing almost all of the Third Doctor’s era, kicking off the Fourth Doctor period with Robot before passing the baton to Philip Hinchcliffe, and coming in to supervise John Nathan-Turner’s work as producer in Tom Baker’s last season. Nonetheless, if you asked people to name the most significant showrunners or producers of the show’s history, they’d probably mention Hinchcliffe (for helming the Fourth Doctor’s most celebrated era), Verity Lambert (for inaugurating the show), Russell T. Davies (for reviving it) or John Nathan-Turner (for a run packed with controversy and capped off with cancellation) before they got to Letts.

That’s probably unfair, though, because Letts has the distinction of leaving his fingerprints on the show over four decades. As well as his run as producer in the early 1970s and executive producer at the dawn of the 1980s, in the late 1960s he directed one of the most distinctive Second Doctor serials (The Enemy of the World), and in the 1990s he picked up right where he left off and started writing new Third Doctor stories like nothing had happened, with Jon Pertwee, Nicholas Courtney, and Elisabeth Sladen all eagerly jumping into their old roles.

There’s a catch there, mind – yes, the band was back together, but they were performing in a different medium this time. The stories were directed and produced by Phil Clarke not for television but for BBC radio, and came about as a result of Jon Pertwee having contributed to some Superman audio dramas that Radio 1 had put out; he’d enjoyed the experience so much he suggested that it might be nice to do some for Doctor Who, Clarke was tapped to produce, and after confirming with Pertwee that he was still up for it Clarke’s first port of call was to get Barry Letts involved, because he knew the Pertwee era characters inside and out and had written some of Clarke’s favourite stories. The end result was broadcast in 1993 – the same year that the nightmare of Dimensions In Time seeped its way onto television. Would Pertwee find his tenure as the Doctor further tarnished by another low-rent latter-day addition, or would he, Letts, Courtney, and Sladen offer something better for the 60th anniversary than a multi-Doctor pileup in the setting of Eastenders?

The Paradise of Death

Space World is a brand new theme park erected on Hampstead Heath in London. The gimmick is that it purports to exhibit real space aliens – though these are illusory. In fact, the exhibits are largely a demonstration of various new special effects technologies developed by the Parakon Corporation, the proprietors – the cream of which is their new Experienced Reality technology, an advanced form of VR. Yet if everything in Space World is an illusion, why has someone turned up dead onsite? The Brigadier smells trouble, and convinces the Doctor to come investigate – and Sarah Jane Smith has been invited with the press party for the grand opening, and is happy to look into things too.

When the Doctor realises that the alien beasts are holographic illusions of real extraterrestrial animals, it becomes clear that the Parakon Corporation are ahead of the curve in terms of more than just VR technology – and the powers that be are resisting the Brigadier’s attempts to bring in a full UNIT intervention. There’s nothing for it but for the Doctor and his friends to board the TARDIS to take their complaints to the Parakon corporation’s headquarters on the other side of the galaxy…

The Douglas Adams Core Canon

There will come a point in my ongoing Doctor Who coverage that I’ll have to talk about season 17 and Shada – which will mean that I have to talk about Douglas Adams a fair bit. Therefore, with the intention of getting myself ready for that, I may as well do a quick little side journey here to cover what you might call the Adams “core canon” – the major works of his once you trim away collaborations (which account for a good chunk of his output). That’ll be the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, plus the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency novels, plus The Salmon of Doubt, which has bits of relevance to both in it and is a posthumous odds and sods collection.

What I won’t be covering here is either of the Dirk Gently TV series, or the big budget movie version of Hitchhiker’s Guide; these all came to fruition without Adams seeing them through to the end, due to him dying in 2001. (Adams’ death just before 9/11 is a bit like David Bowie’s death just before the Brexit referendum – an omen that some really shit times are just around the corner.) We can’t know what he’d have thought of them, can’t fully blame him for their mistakes, and can’t fully praise him for their good bits. Moreover, much of the appeal of Adams’ works comes from his delightful turns of phrase, and so once he died we were left with either interminable remixing and picking over the scraps or people trying to mimic his tone of voice, neither of which could be 100% satisfying from my perspective because ersatz-Adams as far as I am concerned isn’t Adams at all. Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing…, the Adams estate’s officially-endorsed sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, can fuck right off.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy

This is the one which largely doesn’t need to be summarised or reviewed, because it was repackaged and reimagined many times within Adams’ lifetime and beyond it and was a massive hit in several of the forms it incarnated in. Its first form was as the first season of the radio series, six half-hour episodes of hilarity broadcast in March-April 1978, and it’s from these episodes (or “Fits”) which the foundational elements of most subsequent adaptations are obtained.

In particular, you get Arthur Dent’s house being demolished, Arthur Dent’s planet being demolished, Ford Prefect rescuing Arthur from the Earth, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian rescuing Arthur and Ford from being tossed out an airlock by the Vogons (said rescue being an accidental side effect of the Heart of Gold‘s Infinite Improbability Drive), the robots and machines with Genuine People Personalities (including Marvin the Paranoid Android), Magrathea, Earth being a computer, “42” being the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything for which Earth was meant to calculate the question, mice being behind the construction of Earth, the Restaurant At the End of the Universe, Arthur and Ford being stranded on prehistoric Earth with the occupants of the Golgafrinchan B-Ark, and all of this being interspersed with deadpan narration and quotable quotes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, which boldly declares “Don’t Panic” on its cover. (The Golgafrinchan B-Ark was originally the concept for a script a fresher-faced Adams submitted for season 12 of Doctor Who, but which was rejected because the show was already cooking up The Ark In Space.)