Doctor Who – The Lost Stories

#1.04. The Hollows of Time ~ 1/10

◆ An Introduction

Have you ever encountered a script so incomprehensible that it makes you beg for a darkened room and some double-strength paracetamol? This range has been a near total washout up until this point, but things are about to get a whole lot worse.

Many people have been critical of the JNT/Bidmead era for grounding their scripts in real science, myself included, because it just sucked the fun out of so many stories. It wasn’t until I listened to the sixth series of ‘Fourth Doctor Adventures’ that I realised you could make something half-decent with this approach.

Bidmead still made the occasional contribution after being replaced by Saward, including a fan-favourite adventure featuring a race of giant snails who all appeared to be suffering from severe conjunctivitis! I genuinely couldn’t give less of a damn about ‘Frontios’, but someone thought we desperately needed a sequel.

This is going to be horrendous.

◆ Publisher’s Summary

The Doctor and Peri have been on holiday, visiting old friend Reverend Foxwell in the sleepy English village of Hollowdean. But why are their memories so hazy?

Piecing together events they recall a mysterious chauffeur, who is not what he seems, and Foxwell's experiments that could alter the nature of reality. Huge sand creatures have been sighted on the dunes, and many of the locals are devoted to a leader known as 'Professor Stream'.

But who is Stream? And what lies within the Hollows of Time?

The Doctor will discover that not every question has a definitive answer…

◆ The Sixth Doctor

Listening to the interviews for this release was a real treat, because absolutely nobody could work out what was happening! ‘The Hollows of Time’ was going to be a very visual story, but most of these scenes have been replaced in this adaptation with reams of exposition for the Doctor to spout. If that wasn’t bad enough, he occasionally gets dialogue that sounds like incoherent gibberish – “a grasshopper mind let loose on the universe” means what exactly, Bidmead?

Colin Baker described this script as “labyrinthine” during the interviews, which is giving it far more credit than it deserves. It would be more accurate to call it deep fried elephant dung rammed through a letterbox, because the writing stinks. His performance was honestly painful.

They were there, but they have absolutely no idea what happened – feels like an accurate description of listening to this story! Discretion is the better part of travel, which would explain why they took the bus and the train to Hollowdean. The Doctor once had a mechanical dog, in another life: a loyal friend. According to Simon, he knows a lot of long words. If he knew what he was talking about, he would tell Peri.

◆ Peri Brown

Christopher Bidmead should look up the word “entertaining” in a dictionary, because having Peri lumbered with a spoilt brat and wandering through caves full of rotting Tractators is by no means entertaining.

Nicola Bryant appears to be the only member of the cast enjoying themselves. Her performance in ‘The Hollows of Time’ was half-decent, but she really deserved better material than this.

She can’t say that was much of a holiday. The Doctor has warned her about little green creatures lurking in the dark. Her name’s Peri, it means fairy: she turns up in crossword puzzles, not her personally, but her name.

◆ The All-Flowing Stream

Bidmead spent this entire script just waffling absolute horse [REDACTED]. Trying to fathom what actually happened was like attempting to do quadratic equations whilst blackout drunk! There was something about a time traveller attempting to create a quantum gravity engine – another piece of technobabble that means diddly squat – by utilising the Tractators, but that’s about all I could understand. There’s also a random classic Citroën that somehow managed to merge with the TARDIS… are you sure I’m not blackout drunk, because this sounds like the ramblings of a lunatic!

Speaking of the aforementioned time traveller, he was supposed to be the villain of this adventure. Can someone please explain to me then why he only makes a handful of appearances? I understand that Professor Stream was meant to be the Tremas Master – and that BigFinish weren’t allowed to confirm this because of conditions in their contract back then – but he generally does nothing! The real main antagonist should’ve been his android chauffeur, Steel Specs… that’s either the coolest name for a villain or the most melodramatic, I still haven’t decided which.

◆ Sound Design

‘The Hollows of Time’ features many scenes that would’ve blown a season long budget in minutes, so you can clearly see why this one got rejected. An effort has been made to bring these scenes to life on audio, like a 1930s Citroën flying through the time vortex, but this is generally a bland soundscape.

Feet squelching through muddy ground, as a bus comes to a stop near the TARDIS. The train rumbles along the tracks towards Hollowdean. Followers of the “All-Flowing Stream” gather outside of the church hall, the bell chiming in the background. The Doctor falls backwards into some rose bushes, rustling away as he tries to free himself. Foxwell’s robotic turtle whirrs around his workshop. The TARDIS morphs into a Citroën Traction Avant and begins driving through the time vortex. The Tractors make this disgusting squelching noise. Steel Specs activates the remote destruction device, causing the Citroën to disintegrate in the vortex… with the Doctor still inside! What remains of the Citroën comes crashing through Professor Stream’s garage.

◆ Music

Nigel Fairs’ use of woodwind instruments in the score feels like a deliberate callback to ‘Frontios’.

◆ Conclusion

“Goodbye to my faithful old car, and goodbye, less reluctantly to you, Doctor.”

Writing this review genuinely gave me motivation to start daytime drinking; necking copious amounts of Disaronno also makes my head spin, but at least I can have a fun time doing it! Bidmead spent this entire script just waffling arrant nonsense, meaning I hadn’t a clue what was going on half the time.

The performances are dire across the board, the soundscape is intensely boring, and the antagonist barely appears. Seriously, what was the point in having David Garfield turn up for about five scenes throughout the adventure when he does the square root of diddly squat?

I recently discovered that some people actually enjoyed ‘The Hollows of Time’. Clearly, they were handing out free lobotomies with the CD when they bought it!