Short Trips:Companions
A Doctor
Who short story.
It then occured to me that given that Shakespeare travelled with the Doctor
briefly but we never saw him leave, we could use him to address the historical
accuracy of his play Troilus and Cressida. Somewhere in the course
of doing this the idea of playing with different eras of Who
continuity in the same way The Myth Makers had played with the
Trojan War came to mind. Can you bodge it all together while still having fun
and without damaging the source material?
Jacqueline Rayner invited everyone from Zodiac to pitch for
the second Big Finish Who collection. Given that we
had to feature a companion prominently I went for Vicki, because I adored The
Myth Makers novel and surviving audio but reckoned, the way it used The
Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid and
nodded in a nonsensical way to the much later tradition of Troilus and Cressida
demanded a bit of a look at. I dredged up my surviving memory of Classics and
decided to try and bodge everything together, also introducing a link to
Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudo-History of Britain which has the British descended
from Trojans.
Matt Michael in Doctor Who Magazine described the piece as-
"an hilarious story of 'Cressida' meeting the Eighth Doctor and mistaking him for a younger version of his first self."
Trey Korte on Outpost Gallifrey wrote-
'The jewel in the crown of this collection is Ian Potter's "Apocrypha Bipedium", a wonderful short story that serves as a coda to both The Myth Makers and Time of the Daleks. Basically, it has the Doctor, Charley, and Will meeting Troilus and Cressida. Cressida, of course, is Vicki and the Doctor is worried about the timelines. The story is told through a series of historical documents and sources. The sources themselves are a healthy part of the humor in the story. It's very witty, playing with language, point of view, and so on. I never thought there would have been a post-The Myth Makers Vicki story as I didn't know what could be done with it. I am thrilled to be proven wrong. I love Greek mythology and The Myth Makers so this semi-sequel was bound to catch my interest. That Ian Potter told it with such style and panache only added to my enjoyment. This is by far the cleverest and most literate story in the collection.'
Lawrence Conquest also on Outpost Gallifrey wrote-
'Ian Potter’s ‘Apocrypha Bipedium’ is pretty continuity heavy, featuring the 8th Doctor, Charley, William Shakespeare and Vicki, and depends on the reader being familiar with both The Myth Makers and The Time of the Daleks. It also demands close reading due to the fractured narrative voice employed, but within this almost plotless continuity-fest are some fine ideas and wonderful writing. Having already had one of the better stories in the preceding Short Trips volume, Ian Potter seems to be a name to watch for the future. What chance a full-length novel?'
And again on Outpost Gallifrey, Chad Kneupe said-
'My personal favorites include a piece told in a series of Matrix archived reports, library texts and journal entries, reminiscent of the literary masterpiece Henrietta Street, and tells the tale of Cressida. The Eighth Doctor, travelling with Charlie Pollard and William Shakespeare, meets his former companion Vicki. There are some wonderful moments, like when Vicki comes to understand this young man is her good old Doctor, only actually older, and when Shakespeare sets the Doctor straight on the source of his mis-telling of events in his classic play.'
John Seavey on Jade Pagoda said-
'"Apocrypha Bipedium", by Ian
Potter, definitely has its moments, and there
were points I laughed my head off...but it drags on too long (I think ten
pages, instead of twenty, would have been a better length) and it doesn't
help that it's set between two audios I haven't heard, near-totally losing
me in its talk of temporal paradoxes and whatnot. Still, the list the Doctor
gives to Shakespeare at the end of Things Not To Do is worth the whole wait.'
Jamas Enright at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide, didn't much like it describing it as
"bad" and "self indulgent" which is probably about right.
p35 The fictional author's name is an anagram of Donald Cotton, who inspired it in tone and topic. There's also an echo of David Banks' ArcHivists and a definite debt to Frederick Crews' book The Pooh Perplex as well. The subtitle was originally the title until Jacqueline Rayner very sensibly pointed out there wouldn't be room for anything else on the index page as it stood.
The Mysteria Press wrote a lot of books name-checked by Lance Parkin in his A History of the Universe, another inspiration which suggested the fun to be had with telling a story through 'found texts'. The library of suppressed texts held by the Vatican is an idea first adopted for Doctor Who in the Virgin New Adventures range.
The opening passage about Liverpool is a homage to Maureen O'Brien origins (and occasionally obvious 'posh scouse' accent in the series) tied into her character's recollections of Liverpool and childhood in the series which I've attempted to reconcile with Keith Topping's vision of her New London childhood in Byzantium!
This is really the aim of the whole piece in a nutshell, to tie up as many silly flapping bits of story as elegantly as possible while playing with their silliness and giving readers room to do the same. I quite deliberately try not to block future authors too much, and of course the nature of the texts and their possibly erroneous interpretation by scholars leaves acres of room for others who might want to play with the same toys later.
There are, in passing on this page, references to Campus Manor - the current home of Mersey Television, the Beatles memorial and 'mediaeval' castle mentioned by Vicki in The Chase, a fictional character from my first performed play and the dream of Carl Jung about Liverpool which inspired a number of artists in and around the city in the 1970s. We also have a hint that Liverpool will gain at least one more cathedral. New religious movements? Listed building status being conferred on the current ones so new ones need to be built for regular use? Something else entirely? You decide.
p36 There's a reference to the Jewels of Helen discovered by Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik here. These also appear in the Doctor Who - Decalog 3 story Past Reckoning by Jackie Marshall which I've tried not to contradict.
A little later there's also a reference to the Rani's alleged involvement in the Trojan War. It really was an awfully busy neck of the woods.
A silly foreshadowing of The Odyssey occurs here.
Ka Faraq Gatri is the Dalek name for the Doctor first given in Ben Aaronovich's novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks, Snail is the Doctor's 'childhood' nickname.
The most deliberately continuity referenced sentence I could imagine. This uses information gleaned from The Five Doctors, Attack of the Cybermen, Cold Fusion and Lungbarrow to tease us with a story we'll never quite know!
We're then teased with another! Christopher Marlowe, Psionovores, Shakespeare and the relics of Dr John Dee haven't been tied up in any story we know of, but maybe they will be. I deliberately excluded Dee himself from the anecdote to avoid any contradiction to his previous portrayal in Nigel Robinson's Doctor Who novel Birthright. Dee has since appeared in Who fiction again in Mark Wright's story Mortlake in Short Trips: Past Tense, and cleverly Mark gives us a Dee there who fits nicely both the historical and fictional Dee, depending on which we're more familiar with.
p37 Elgin and Kar-Charrat first appear in the Big Finish audio The Genocide Machine. The Great Cock-Up is an unspecified historical disaster Mark Michalowski referenced in his Doctor Who spin-off story Digging up the Past in the book Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Dead Men Diaries. I have inserted an un-illuminating and ambiguous extra hint of what the cock up might have been. This is one of the things I love in Doctor Who most- the teasing hints of worlds we never quite see. To my mind the Filipino army advancing on Reyjavik is an image to tickle our imaginations not to be depicted in an epic novel.
Continuity references follow from the end of the audio The Time of the Daleks which I know pretty much backwards after doing the sound design on it.
The writings of Dr Seuss and JM Barrie are alluded to here, foreshadowing moving use of their work in the audio Neverland.
Fun is had with spellings of Shakespeare's name here and elsewhere, he was hardly consistent so neither am I. The authors' names are nods to the authors of various 70s nutty books on UFOlogy and the like, Heinrich Schliemann (excitedly making his second appearance on this page), and the pseudonym used by Barry Letts when he novelised The Daemons.
p38 The verse is deliberately bad, reflecting the influence of recent reading on the author and how bad his actual early works were! The scansion is stricter than in any of the plays because I knew Peter Anghelides would pick up any inaccuracies after hearing him talk about Paul Cornell's similar homage The Trials of Tara in Decalog 2, it still isn't perfect iambic pentameter though.
Another silly continuity blitz occurs here. The Doctor's 'Aunt Flavia' line from Seasons of Fear is taken half seriously and crowbarred into the mythos of Gallifrey developed in the Virgin New Adventures, along with a reference from Douglas Adams' Shada and a nod to the female voice that reads out the History of Gallifrey in The Deadly Assassin.
Similarly, there's Doctor Who jargon from various eras and freshly minted intermingled here with regard to how the TARDIS works..
p40 We hint that the nature of cricket may well change radically in years to come here (and make my sister a famous player of the future).
A couple of jokes here play on Vicki's confusion over the nature of 20th Century pop music in The Chase.
p45 Here I tie up what we learn about the writing of Hamlet in The Chase and City of Death. I don't have the Doctor mention the events of Andy Lane's novel The Empire of Glass here in which Vicki meets Shakespeare though.
It would have added a bit of extra fun and confusion but would have required still more Doctorly anecdoting to slip in when I was already approaching 8000 words! I contemplated it for a while but in the end decided the set up was too great to justify the pay off and I'd be better off not mentioning it and leaving readers who knew the novel the room to wonder why the Doctor doesn't talk about it.
Does he remember? If he does, does he actively exclude the information? If so, why? Is there perhaps an individual who was involved in that story who's existence he doesn't want others to know of? I have a theory, others may have others.
It's worth bearing in mind that we don't actually know what Doctor we have narrating this tale. He's obviously from some point after Zagreus but the chronology of the 8th Doctor has not as yet been explicitly resolved. Is this even the 8th Doctor narrating? His reported eating habits and prose style might imply not. If he is a future Doctor he appears to have his memories back (currently AWOL in the BBC books), does he have them all?
That's the joy of presenting fragmentary and unreliable texts; just because it's there doesn't mean it's true and, just because it's not, doesn't mean it's not!
The ending of the story does however tie in with The Empire of Glass explictly.
Ganymede Socket is a play on the Zeus Plugs mentioned in The Hand of Fear and a sly gag for Classicists.
The mention of President Pandak and his cats plays on a line from Mark of the Rani that I think was first expanded on in an old Gary Russell Doctor Who Magazine article on Gallifrey's history.
p45 Troilus has grown a beard since we last saw him, though to be fair all most of us have seen of him is the side of half his face in one of the few surviving images from this story. I think he's trying to model himself on his dad, the fabulously bearded King Priam.
p47 I think I make a very sensible point about one of Homer's stock phrases "the wine-dark sea" here. Incidentally Donald Cotton's wonderful novelisation of The Myth Makers has Homer living with Vicki and Troilus, I don't mention this here, not least because the novel rewrites much of the TV show it's based on, making it impossible to be consistent with both versions of the tale.
p50 There's a line here which may imply Vicki remembers the events of The Empire of Glass here, of course if you've not read the book however it will imply no such thing.
p51 Dear me, another bad joke for Classicists about Helen of Troy's parentage.
p52 I've chosen to hint that some of the story of A Midsummer's Night Dream might just have been inspired by events the Doctor was involved in, possibly in part from him relating his exploits told in the Doctor Who novella Nightdreamers to the Bard, or maybe The Trials of Tara...? Come to think of it, the Doctor is quite capable of having given Anthony Hope the plot of The Prisoner of Zenda and told versions of Underworld and The Horns of Nimon to some ancient mythographer, isn't he?
p53 Ah yes, another one for Classicists - "Rosy-fingered Dawn" is another stock Homeric phrase.
p54 There is a line here of massive significance offering a possible route for explaining for why Will didn't mention meeting the Doctor in The Time of the Daleks in The Empire of Glass, but did mention meeting the fourth Doctor in that story. We can sleep soundly tonight knowing it's been resolved!
Or has
it? Some day the tale of the business with Kitty Marlowe and the scrying glass
may be related and tell us differently. After all, if Marlowe's alive during that, that
escapade must predate The Empire of Glass, surely...
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