Short Trips: The Muses #01 - “Teach Yourself Ballroom Dancing” by Robert Shearman

Becky is a dance teacher. Becky is not living the life she wants, with a marriage on the rocks and a daily routine that’s slowly killing her. But when a stranger walks into Becky’s dance class, she finds out there’s a lot more to life than she once thought.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I am now one story closer to completing Robert Shearman. The author that has penned some of my favourite pieces of fiction ever, his speciality seems to be in the realm of short stories. However, I’m yet to be blown away by any of his short fiction Doctor Who works.

Teach Yourself Ballroom Dancing was a short and sweet story that boasted a lot of Shearman’s long running themes, such as a cynical sense of humour and themes surrounding self worth and everyday struggles. The main character, Becky, is shockingly deep for a character introduced over fifteen pages and I found her to be pretty endearing, which is not shocking coming from a writer who consistently makes relatably mundane characters. The narrative is pretty low stakes, all things considered, mostly exploring the connection between the Doctor and Becky and how each influences the other, which is a pretty nice but relatively brief character study. I also liked the Doctor flicking back and forth through Becky’s timestream, eventually teaching her how to dance; I thought it was an interesting use of time travel in a story like this.

However, I feel like Shearman is a lot better suited to writing Eight rather than Six, because really I could have put nearly any doctor but Six here. Especially in the height of his ostentatious phase, he just feels blandly nice here and I also think his ambiguous feelings towards Becky weren't handled particularly well. Honestly, my biggest problem with this story is that it really didn’t hit me the same as it did other people, which is a real shame. I liked the themes of childhood dreams and missed opportunities, but these are a recurring motif for Shearman and I think he’s done it better elsewhere.

7/10

Pros:

+ Becky made for an endearing central character

+ Used an interesting approach to time travel to build the central dynamic

Cons:

- Felt Six wasn’t particularly in character

- Not as poignant as I felt it wanted to be

Another brilliant piece from Rob Shearman, though it's very unlike most of his stories, it's nowhere near as violent or dark as he usually is, though it still carries a lot of that blunt cynical sense of humour you usually find in his writing. The story is very simply put, the Doctor learning ballroom dancing and becoming very attached to his tutor who is in the midst of a miserable marriage and looking back with regret on unfulfilled dreams. The story is very akin to The Girl in the Fireplace but in an out of order sense and no real plot or stakes and the ending is just beautiful. Shearman really does bring out his A game with the Sixth Doctor and visa versa.