The Monthly Adventures #78 - "Pier Pressure" by Robert Ross

What makes a bad story? Is it a fatal flaw? A hamartia in the narrative? The dialogue or the characters or the morals? Is it a slow plot or bad style? Is it the result of completely subjective viewpoints and this whole “reviewing” business is actually pointless? Probably not that last one but for me, a bad story can be composed of three things: incompetence, boredom or amorality. Robert Ross’ previous effort - the painful Medicinal Purposes - was one of my absolute least favourite Monthly Adventures for hitting all three of my fatal flaws listed above and so seeing his next story was rated even lower, I expected something beyond my comprehension, an eldredge horror of pain and torment and shoddy scriptwriting. What I got just turned out to be a bad story, let’s talk about it.

There’s a presence on Brighton Beach. Teamed up with legendary comedian Max Miller, the Doctor and Evelyn find themselves fighting something very old and very patient, something rising from beneath the West Pier.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I’m really going to struggle deciding if I place this above or below Medicinal Purposes because they’re both pretty similar in quality, if for different reasons. Robert Ross, in between stories, seems to have made a good few improvements to his writing - but traded them for a few extra kinks in his storytelling. The first thing that jumped out to me was that the dialogue was actually pretty alright; not spectacular but compared to the absolute dumpster fire that was Medicinal Purposes’ line readings, it was a godsend. I can confidently say that Pier Pressure’s characters feel like actual people and not words on a script. Doesn’t save them from being boring as sin though. There was one person here who did seem a little bit more intriguing than the rest, and that was good old Sixie. The last time Ross wrote for Six, our ever intrepid hero was walking a young man with a learning disability to his death with little more than a shrug but here, Six is presented in a more interesting and vulnerable way than he has been for a good long while. I honestly love the idea of the Doctor getting burnt out and for all the shade I can throw at the rest of this story, I can confidently say Six was a genuine diamond in the rough.

However I can throw so much shade at the rest of this script that it may as well be night. Let’s start with the other characters since we’re on the subject. Like I said before, the dialogue is a lot better here than it was in Ross’ last story and the performances are all around pretty decent but the trouble we really run into is that nobody’s particularly interesting. In fact, everybody here’s basically a walking bit of cardboard. We have a generic historical figure in the form of Max Miller, who honestly just feels like a discount Jago for most of the story, and the young couple of Albert and Emily. Now, Emily’s just there to be scared and then die but props to Ross for at least trying something with Albert, who slowly breaks over the course of the audio after Emily’s demise at the end of the second part. However, the rest of the time he’s just about the most generic side character you can get and this trauma only really shows when the script needs it to. I think the worst offender though is Evelyn, who Ross clearly misunderstands entirely. This whole audio, she’s sidelined and presented as generally feckless and doting, which are two words that should never be used to describe Evelyn. I don’t know whose choice it was to bring her back after Thicker than Water but I hope they got sacked.

But I can get past a bad cast, they’re a dime a dozen in Doctor Who and it’s not what makes Pier Pressure an absolute travesty. For all intents and purposes, this is about as simple as a Who story can get: there’s an evil alien in the waters around West Pier and it’s possessing people; painfully generic, sure, but not game breaking. But somehow, Ross takes what has to be the easiest possible plot to convey to the audience, and presents it in the most confoundingly strange way possible. This whole audio’s direction is wack man, it makes absolutely no sense. Character’s will just guess what’s happening and be right, scenes of peril will end and then cut to hours later when the dangers have been resolved offscreen, we’ll be told about things that outright didn’t happen. To give you an example of this, the story begins with the Doctor hearing about missing people in a newspaper and hearing a story about a weird noise on the beach. He then immediately surmises that an alien is Brighton and it has something to do with a psychic who is supposed to have been dead for fifteen years, all of this without any prompting. Twenty minutes in and already I have absolutely no clue what is happening or how we got there. It’s like the Doctor knows he’s in a story and knows something has to be happening. And things like this just keep repeating, it feels as if half the scenes have been cut out. Part three ends with Evelyn and Miller getting possessed - chanting “kill the Doctor” - and the sound of the Doctor falling into the sea; anybody would assume they pushed him, right? Well, Part Four begins with them all in the TARDIS, Evelyn and Miller suddenly unpossessed, the reveal that the Doctor apparently jumped in himself for seemingly little reason and he was pulled out by a character who has been nothing but antagonistic this whole audio and has suddenly turned good. Huh? It’s mind numbing how everything is presented, especially when the actual meat of the story is so generic and hollow. The direction of this story I can only describe as deranged because it’s often hard to work out where each scene is even set.

This really begins to derail the story the more it goes on, perhaps the worst when it’s trying to wrap itself up. Because of how vaguely and bizarrely everything’s conveyed, I found the whole thing to be pretty tensionless, and the antagonist really didn’t help. It’s a generic alien intelligence, with a generic “take over the world!” plan and a generic backstory. Their human conduit - the crazed Talbot - is a little more threatening, what with his insane double personality, but mainly because he’s played by the brilliant Doug Bradley, most famous for playing Pinhead in the Hellraiser franchise. But he’s not enough to save this story, we trundle along with next to no momentum or atmosphere. Medicinal Purposes, for all its faults, at least felt well realised in its historical setting but my home town of Brighton feels like a single pier and five people, there is absolutely no sense of scale or immersion to be found.

Pier Pressure can only be described as a bad story. Not atrocious, not terrible for any particular reason, it’s just like the distillation of a bad story. I think it’s a little better than Medicinal Purposes, if only because it lacks the blatant amorality of that trash fire, but Robert Ross is clearly not a talented writer. Why the guy was allowed three different Main Range stories is a complete mystery to me. Awful characters, a confusing plot that seems to be in spite of the listener and a distinctly generic air to it make this maybe the most skippable Doctor Who story ever created.

3/10

Pros:

+ Took an interesting direction with Six

+ It’s dialogue is a vast improvement from Medicinal Purposes

Cons:

- The side cast is made of cardboard

- Presented in the most confusing way possible

- The villain is incredibly underwhelming

- Evelyn continues to be mischaracterised

- Brighton is awfully realised