1963: Fanfare for the Common Men

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: 1001 Nights

This was great fun, I love that a throwaway line from the first episode of Doctor Who has been expanded on like this. I couldn't write a review for this story without mentioning the score, it's definitely not Beatles-level but it's genuinely quite good and certainly captures the style. It's one of many things that has made this story stand out.

The cast are all great but I especially have to point out the Common Men themselves, Mitch Benn, Andrew Knott and David Dobson as Mark, James and Korky respectively. They were easily the highlight of this story and a great stand-in for the Beatles in my opinion.

My only issue with this story was in the pacing, it's constantly jumping around and really difficult to follow. It doesn't help that there are plenty of paradoxes and general timey-wimey stuff. While I definitely enjoy that, this is a story where you really need to pay attention all the time to know what's going on.

Overall though, it's an exceptional story and a great little celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who.

Next Story: Moonflesh

I quite enjoyed Fanfare for the Common Men. The whole concept is quite brilliant as not only does it make sense in the story that the Common Men would sound Beatles-adjacent, but not actually the expensive Beatles music. It worked really well and made this audio extremely pleasant and easy to listen to for the whole run. It makes this story very unique among Doctor Who stories and really stuck with me in a positive way.

The story does jump around a lot and the pacing is odd sometimes but it is a lot of fun. The voices behind Mark, James and Korky were a lot of fun. Lenny was a bit over-the-top as a villain and not overly serious as a character, but there was a sense of intimidation in the air as history was so clearly being rewritten. It felt like good stakes for the Doctor but separating him from Nyssa kind of led to some pointless time jumping in the story while not really doing either character many favours in the process.

Plot aside, this story had a really strong sense of setting to it I really liked. The music is a big part of that but even the sense of culture shift brought on by the Beatles missing from history was really well done. It had a lot of good details to it like the draft in the UK being still in effect, for example. As a 50th anniversary project, this works well too given the timing of Doctor Who's origins, coupled with a pretty clever reference to the pilot episode. All told I would absolutely recommend Fanfare for the Common Men. It wasn't for me, but feels like a great jumping on point for new listeners.