Doctor Who is the series that can do anything.  It’s format is limitless.  That said, on television at least, the basic rules of dramatic narrative tend to be followed.  Only on a few occasions has this been tampered with, an example being Love & Monsters.  On audio and away from the confines of delivering a series not just for fans but also for the ‘casual viewer’, Big Finish have had more freedom to experiment with the manner in which their stories are told.  I’ve found these releases to be of varying success.  I couldn’t abide The Natural History Fear and wasn’t a great fan of Live 34 or Creatures of Beauty.  On the flipside (if you’ll excuse the pun) I love Flip Flop and adore Doctor Who and the Pirates which, looking at the release schedule, was actually the first time they really tried something different in the main range.

Doctor Who and the Pirates is, famously, the musical one.  It’s become a bit of a thing for television series to do a ‘musical episode’ ever since Buffy the Vampire Slayer led the way with the brilliant Once More With Feeling.  I’m a bit of a fan of musicals, although not so much of Gilbert and Sullivan, but the idea of Doctor Who finally dipping it’s toe into these waters filled me with joy.  Of course, Big Finish did bottle it slightly in that only the third episode is musical, but the entire release plays with the nature of story telling and narrative as Evelyn, and subsequently the Doctor, attempt to prevent a death by telling the story of a tragic adventure they had just experienced.

Much of the first episode is an Evelyn showcase.  She barrels into Sally’s room and begins her story without so much as a by your leave to Sally.  Little hints here and there allow the listener to realise that all is not well with either Evelyn or Sally and this is countered by the hilarity resulting from Evelyn’s initially incredibly clichéd tale of pirates and treasure.  Maggie Stables is wonderful and once the Doctor turns up, Colin Baker provides admirable support.  And I mean that term quite specifically.  It does feel through much of this story that the Doctor is the ‘companion’ to Evelyn.  This is a story about Evelyn dealing with the death of Jem and the potential suicide of Sally.  The Doctor is there to provide moral support.

The pirate part of the story is, as I have said, very clichéd but this is entirely the point.  Evelyn is trying to tell a happy, funny story about one of her adventures with the Doctor whilst trying to avoid the tragic end.  Her pirates all have the same voice and have names like John Johnson, Bill Billson, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.  There are terrible inconsistencies in her tale; one moment the boat is sinking, the next it isn’t.  Red Jaspar, the villain of the piece, begins the story as a comical, over the top baddie.  Bill Oddie goes to town chewing virtual scenery left, right and centre.  But as the story progresses the performance subtly changes to one of murderous insanity.  The Doctor and Evelyn point out time and again that he is insane and although Oddie’s performance never quite makes it down from the rafters there is a narrative reason for this.  His ruthlessness at dealing with the other pirates is horrendous especially when he cuts out the tongue of one for disagreeing with him.The other part of the tale, Sally, is equally affecting.  Helen Goldwyn is excellent.  Trying to be nice to Dr Smythe but really wanting her to go away and allow her to deal with the death of her boyfriend which she feels responsible for.  I do think she accepts what Evelyn and the Doctor are saying a little too easily but maybe this is due to the fact that she is distracted by her own tragedy and isn’t really thinking too hard about what they are saying to her.

So what of the musical episode?  As I’ve said, I am not a massive fan of Gilbert and Sullivan although I love musicals, particularly stage ones, with all my heart.  That said, one of my first musical experiences was a video of a very strange cartoon drawn by Gerald Scarfe called Dick Deadeye which was a bizarre mash up of lots of different Gilbert and Sullivan characters and songs.  My brother received it for Christmas one year in his stocking (I got some sciency video about slowed down camera trickery of drops of water splashing and the like).  Needless to say, my brother cast it aside fairly quickly but I watched it on countless occasions.  One of the reasons might have been the climax of the story which featured all the characters pitching up on a desert island to be greeted by its Amazonian natives, complete with bare breasts!  This was a PG certificate video!  Anyway, as a result, the songs have long been part of my psyche.  This means that Doctor Who and the Pirates has the advantage of triggering a fond nostalgia when I listen to its own versions of familiar songs.  The singing is very good, particularly Helen Goldwyn, and the songs are witty and arranged well.  Quite whether the conceit of turning the story into a musical to provide a happy ending works narratively I’m not entirely sure but as an excuse for a bit of fun (and one beautiful song from Sally) I think it can be forgiven.

Historically, this story probably owes more, as Sally points out, to the 19th century clichés of pirates such as Long John Silver and, obviously, the Pirates of Penzance.  This is a story which is set in the 1700s but is presented far more in the style of the 1800s.  It is interesting that Evelyn states this is ‘not her period’ which allows her to use all manner of pirate clichés but when she doesn’t even know that the ‘flat end’ of the boat is called the stern I did raise my eyebrows slightly.  She is a lecturer in the Tudor period when there was a lot of exploration in ships going on so surely she would know something as basic as that about boats.The only historical reference made is to Queen Anne dating this story to sometime between 1702 and 1714.  Lance Parkin has gone for a date of around 1705 but doesn’t really give any other explanation in Ahistory as to why (although he does state there is no other dating evidence aside from being set in the 1700s which seems to ignore the reference made to Queen Anne).

Doctor Who and the Pirates will probably always be one of my favourite Big Finish audios but, like all good things, too much of this style would probably begin to grate.  I will always admire Big Finish for being willing to push the boundaries of what Doctor Who is; something I think many fans find difficult in their rigid set views as to what the series should be; and I really hope that a full on four episode musical eventually surfaces (The Ultimate Adventure adaptation notwithstanding) because I think it could be wonderful.  It could easily feature, in the tradition of Charley Pollard, the 6th Doctor picking up Lucie Miller (Sheridan Smith is a brilliant musical actress) and finding themselves on a planet where everyone communicates in song, or the TARDIS translation unit goes on the blink or something…