The Wormery

A long time ago, the 6th Doctor was put on trial by the Time Lords and viewers got a 14 episode epic that introduced the character of the Valeyard – a distillation of the Doctor’s dark side from somewhere between his 12th and final incarnation.

Also, a long time ago, Big Finish had only released 50 stories. The 51st story was called The Wormery and featured Colin Baker, Katy Manning and Maria McErlane and was written by Paul Magrs.
It’s mad to think of how long ago both those things were.

Back then, an audio with a solo 6th Doctor meeting Iris Wildthyme was quite the novelty (on audio, Iris had only appeared in Excelis Dawns at this point). Nowadays with Doctors meeting all manner of time-hopping, larger than life characters, the combination seems less remarkable.

But The Wormery is an unusual story in many ways and not just for it’s combination of the loud and brash Iris with the equally loud and brash Doctor (a contrast to their first audio meeting in Excelis Dawns with Iris joining forces with the 5th Doctor). This, in a way, is far more an Iris story than a Doctor Who story and as well as dipping its toe in the world of musical theatre, it also has one of the strangest aliens in Doctor Who – tequila worms!

The story is vague about it’s dating, merely mentioning the 1930s but A History pinpoints it to 1930. But far more important than historical placement, is the fact that this story is based in the fictional world of the musical Cabaret (and there are strong echoes of another, lesser known musical, She Loves Me, which has a sequence set in a cafe with a similar atmosphere to the club seen in Cabaret. It’s also set in the 1930s, although in Hungary rather than Germany).

Along with my other passions, I’m a massive fan of musical theatre. It all started back when I was 13 and I was taken to see Starlight Express for my birthday. It blew me away and, combined with regular trips to the pantomime every Christmas throughout my childhood and a regularly played LP of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, cemented by love. It’s an expensive interest so I don’t go to the theatre as much as I’d like.  However, just as I can reel off the name of every actor to play the Doctor, name every companion, identify production codes and list the entire Peter Davison era in story order, I can also recite – word for word – lyrics from numerous musicals.

Cabaret is not one I’ve ever been a huge fan of, though – at least, not the famous Liza Minelli-starring film. I am quite fond, however, of a stage production that was once shown on ITV starring Jane Horrocks and Alan Cumming. It’s bawdy, salacious and moving all at once with the chilling undercurrent of facism lingering in the background.

That last sentence could, to some extent, also describe The Wormery. Iris is bawdy. Bianca – the owner of the club where the Doctor ends up – is silky and alluring. The Doctor is melancholic, reflecting on his trial and discovery of the existence of the Valeyard and the path Germany is setting out on quietly lingers in the background of the story.

I remember enjoying this story on first listen, all those years ago, but this time found myself a little bored by the time the final episode came round. Part of the problem is the limited setting of Bianca’s cabaret club. The revelation that it is actually floating in the vortex is good but quickly means the story is stuck in the same set of rooms for four episodes. Contributing to the claustrophobia is the limited cast of characters – the Doctor, Iris, Bianca, Mickey (a waitress at the club) and Henry (the manager) are the only principal players with a couple of customers bolstering the ranks. A small cast is not necessarily a problem, and Big Finish have good form on producing excellent stories with limited casts. But when a cast is dominated by Katy Manning’s Iris, no one else really gets a chance to get a word in edgeways.

Maria McErlane, who I really only know as the cheeky voice-over of Eurotrash, is good as Bianca but she ends up being a bit one note. Her reveal as basically being Iris’s version of the Valeyard is fun, but doesn’t really go anywhere as it is a deliberate retread of the Doctor’s relationship with the Valeyard. There’s nothing new beyond the initial amusement of the parallel.

Henry, the manager, is stoic (and reminiscent of the head waiter of the cafe in She Loves Me) and then generically evil once his true affiliations are revealed. Mickey, the waitress, is the best character. Effectively becoming the Doctor’s surrogate companion, she also narrates the story in the framing story which involves listening to audio surveillance tapes of events at the club.

This is one of Katy Manning’s earlier outings as Iris. I’m never quite sure about what I think of Iris. I like the concept of the character and have enjoyed her own audio series but often, and especially here, in The Wormery, I find Manning’s performance to be just a bit ‘much’. It’s very broad and quite an assault on the ears. I love Manning but she is very much a ‘character’ in the same way Tom Baker and John Levene have become. Iris sometimes comes across as Manning just with a Northern accent. There isn’t a huge amount of nuance or subtlety to her Iris – at least not in these earlier audios, and especially in this one as there is also a fair bit of ‘drunk’ acting which always, to my ears, comes across as quite forced. I think that actually she becomes better when she has a companion to bounce off, especially when she is paired with David Benson’s Panda. In this story, though, she is just a little too much, especially when put alongside the equally bombastic 6th Doctor and the overly-silky Bianca.

Colin Baker, though, is well-served in this story by a melancholic take on his Doctor which directly picks up on the ramifications of his recent trial. Baker does some good work and his scenes with both McErlane and Manning are the stronger parts of the story – at least for him.

The threat in this story – alien worms inside bottles of tequila – is a strange one for Doctor Who. It’s certainly not a storyline I can see the BBC agreeing to nowadays and, for me, doesn’t quite fit into the world of Doctor Who as well as some weird threats have done in other stories. Part of my issue was the worm’s plans to control all of humanity with their mind powers. Because they achieve this through alcohol I sort of wondered what about those people who don’t drink? I’m one of those people and so it maybe struck me more but a couple of times when the overall plan was being discussed, I sat there thinking – hang on, that wouldn’t work. I know we can say that of many a Doctor Who villain’s plan to take over the world, but here – maybe because I was getting increasingly tired of the characters and setting by the end – I found myself pondering it much more.

Historically, as I have said, this is more based around the ‘Cabaret’ world of 1930 Berlin. However, what we do get is the first mention in our marathon of a group of people who will have a significant impact on upcoming stories – the Nazis. A group of German soldiers are present throughout the story, often being intimidating – but it is not till the final episode that the Doctor explicitly refers to them as Nazis. I’m not sure, though, if this contradicts A History’s 1930 placing as a bit of research suggests the Nazis weren’t really a prominent organisation until a couple of years later. Nevertheless, it’s marks a important milestone in this marathon for them to be referred to be name.

The Wormery, oddly, is a story I remembered enjoying and looked forward to re-hearing. This has been one of those rare occasions where a story has gone down in my estimation rather than, what usually happens, up. I found the characters annoying, the setting limiting and the story just a bit too ‘out there’. There’s individual aspects that appeal, but as a whole, a disappointing revisit.

The Monthly Adventures #051 - “The Wormery" by Paul Magrs and Stephen Cole

The Wormery, from its very beginning, was a mistake. Despite being the 51st release, it came out alongside Master, before Zagreus and, even in correct listening order, is this odd break in tension during the Divergent Arc. However, despite its bizarre placement and messy release, I had high hopes going into this; Paul Magrs is a writer who particularly intrigues me and whose previous audio in the Main Range - The Stones of Venice - I found enjoyable. Stephen Cole is most definitely a writer I’m not too fond of, what stories from him I have experienced being mediocre, but I assumed his involvement would be minimal, what with The Wormery being the introduction of Magrs’ most popular character - Iris Wildthyme - into The Monthly Adventures. I was wrong.

Bianca’s is a very exclusive little club, a decadent little corner of Berlin where you could find the meaning of life at the bottom of a glass. The Doctor has come here to put his feet up, but the sudden arrival of time travelling adventuress and alcoholic Iris Wildthyme puts a spanner in the works. But there are dark things going on in Bianca’s, things in the shadows, and they know Iris. All too well.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Before anything else, the plot of The Wormery interested me; the blurb was a lot of intriguing ideas I couldn’t wait to dig into. And a lot of them revolved around one Iris Wildthyme. Being somebody who has been anxious to get into Paul Magrs’ extensive catalogue for a while now, I was very excited to finally meet his most popular addition to the Whoniverse. And for the most part, I wasn’t disappointed. Iris was a lot to handle at first, she comes in loud and proud and is sort of a sensory overload but as the story goes on, Katy Manning’s enthusiastic performance and a distinct consistency in characterisation turn her into a fun and wholly chaotic character that easily brightens what is an otherwise exhausting story. Not that she needed to brighten the setting itself, however, the mellow and velvet-lined Bianca’s is a really fantastic locale that not only exudes a palpable atmosphere but also includes a nice sci-fi twist, being a space station accessible by a number of wormholes throughout time and space, including one in 1930s Berlin. And Bianca herself, owner of the club, makes for a really great antagonist. Nice performance aside, the idea that she’s Iris’ version of the Valeyard, the darker amalgamation of her that crept out towards the end of her life, trying to steal her former self’s remaining regenerations, is a wild concept that I think works superbly and fits in with the magical realism thing Cole and Magrs were going for here. And that’s it. That’s everything I liked. At least, everything I could understand. Seven shows up at the end, McCoy gets one line and then the story ends but it’s sort of fun I guess, was a nice little refresher after slogging through the rest of this god forsaken mess.

Can I say I didn’t like The Wormery? Yes, but not without a “but”. Afterall, how can one dislike something they couldn’t understand? This story is utter bullshit, and there is no cleaner, kinder or easier word to describe it. Cole and Magrs throw so many ridiculous ideas at the wall and it’s fascinating how few of them stick. I don’t know if it was just me, and I wasn’t paying close enough attention or something, but this story is so nonsensical and confusing and overpacked with technobabble that it just loses me. There are worms in the drinks, and they’re alive and there are also living shadows that are infecting the clientele and they’re like the worms but only what the worms could’ve been and this all somehow ties into the Bianca plot and also the Doctor is in love now. Yeah, this audio tries to do some interesting characterisation, especially with its leads, but it completely and utterly fails. There’s this whole subplot where the Doctor falls in love with Bianca, much to Iris’, who seemed to be in love with him herself, dismay. The Doctor falling in love is a concept as old as time that has rarely been done well. It’s so well established that the Doctor finds it hard to love, his life like stepping stones, never being able to settle and being so superior to everybody around him inherently, it would take a lot of care to positively say that he had fallen in love. If you want a good example, see the very next audio - Scherzo - which I think executes this better than anything before it. It’s brief and undefined and ridiculous and it’s a shame that Cole and Magrs tried any character development because their cast is a group of cardboard cut outs with funny voices. Every person here is a cartoon, besides maybe Bianca or the Doctor, and it is gruelling to sit through. I did not care about anybody here and the entire time I was waiting for different people to stop talking. And I wanted people to stop talking the most when the story kept flicking back to a pointless framing narrative. For some reason, this story is being told by an older version of one of the characters and they won’t stop interrupting. There is a bit in part one where she interrupts literally every five minutes to tell us about the thing we just listened to and it is not only patronising but endlessly irritating. Unnecessary narration seems to be a thing that irks me, when there is nothing added through it, it just becomes an interruption.

And that is all I have to say about The Wormery. I would go a little more in depth, talk about which parts of the plot I liked or didn’t like but, to be honest, I can’t. It is a confusing, self sabotaging, patronising, exhausting mess and I have never seen anything fail so miserably at every single thing it wants to do. Nothing works, no idea comes through. That blurb, the one that made me so interested in The Wormery, might as well be pointless because every intriguing thing on there is completely sidelined so Cole and Magrs can keep blabbing about shadows or some other crap.

3/10

Pros:

+ Iris was infectiously fun and chaotically realised by a stunning Katy Manning

+ Bianca’s was a great setting with a fun idea behind it

+ Bianca herself, both in concept and character, made for a good antagonist

+The cameo from Seven was a nice amendment

Cons:

- Is a maelstrom of poorly conceived technobabble

- The cast is overflowing with one dimensional cartoons

- The narration is utterly pointless and keeps interrupting

- Tries and fails to work in interesting character development

- Muddled story that is near impossible to keep a track of

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

Previous Story: The Ultimate Foe

While I've heard of Iris before, this is my first proper story with her and wow, what an interesting character. For starters, she's played really well by Katy Manning, so much so that if she wasn't on the cover I wouldn't have recognised her. She's nothing at all like Jo Grant, in fact she's quite the opposite. Her chemistry with Colin Baker's Doctor is also really great, even though this is their first story together they really sell the idea that they have a long history.

This story is really interesting because for a good chunk of it there's no real antagonist or anything, it just feels like you're sitting there in Bianca's watching all this unfold. It's got some great vibes. The story picks up around halfway in, the idea that Bianca is Iris' Valeyard was a great twist. In hindsight it makes a lot of sense, Bianca is the polar opposite to Iris in the same way the Valeyard is to the Doctor. I also like how closely Iris parallels the Doctor, it's very meta. I do like the framing device of the story, it gives it a very different feel than most adventures and it gives us a little cameo from Seven. Overall, a really odd story but fun nonetheless.

Next Story: The Ratings War

MR 051: The Wormery

In the middle of 1930s Berlin sits a little club called Bianca's and in that club sits a leading lady, staring every night in her own show. No, this is not the beginning of the 1970s Broadway musical Cabaret. This is the beginning of the first post-Zagreus main range story: The Wormery. This is the first of two appearances in the main range for that trans-temporal adventurous Iris Wildthyme.

Iris is a bit of a meme character, created in the first place to make fun of Doctor Who in general and she certainly does that in this story. Her TARDIS is a large double decker bus that is actually SMALLER on the inside. Her best friend is a sentient talking stuffed panda bear plush, although he doesn't like you to mention it. She's usually drinking at any given point, a fact that will come in handy in this story.

Most of this story is just vibes, like the musical Cabaret. We're just kind of vibing in the club with the Doctor, Iris, Bianca, Mickey the bar waitress, Henry, the manager, and Allis and Ballis, the strange double act dimensional physicists who are holding this place together somehow. The story is revealed to us in bits and bobs. It's mostly pretty meandering. Mickey is telling the story in the far future through recordings of what happened. Bianca loves singing and pleasing her clientelle. Henry is often put upon. Allis and Ballis are weird. Iris shows up at the beginning already drunk and falls off her stool dead drunk, passed out. Apparently she's maybe stolen some of the house special? Or it's her own? Either way Bianca is not impressed.

The Doctor has come here just to relax and for entertainment after his trial, most unlike him. He is also quite surprised to see Iris, someone who has been dogging his steps for centuries. She's in love with the Doctor, you see, but he's not really capable of love. In fact, he even talks about how, when he was a kid, he broke down the exact physical process that creates love in a paper so it doesn't really hold much mystique for him.

It's at the end of the first episode that we learn Bianca's is actually in deep space, not in 1930s Berlin at all. Or rather it is in 1930s Berlin, but it's also on numerous other planets. There are portals that connect it to many different planets. This is where it starts to go a bit technobabbly unfortunately and it starts to kill the vibe a little bit. Not too much though.

Iris learns that there are worms in the alcohol and in the makeup. When she drank Bianca's alcohol she started hearing voices and so she drank some more and kept hearing the voices. She at first thought it was because she was drunk, of course, but it's actually because that's where the worms live and they were talking to her. Naturally. That's what we should all blame when we're drunk. It's the worms talking to us.

It turns out the worms have two different factions. The pros want to freeze time at a very specific moment using Bianca's singing voice so as to make sure nothing ever changes or evolves and they retain their perfect worm forms. While the antis want to use Iris's singing voice to cause mass chaos everywhere in the universe. Neither of which are very good. Iris thinks these worms are quite mad.

We then later learn that Bianca is... duh duh duh.... Iris herself. Naturally. She is trying to steal all of Iris's remaining regenerations.... wait... where have I heard this one before? She sees Iris as the ugly shell and she's the beautiful butterfly waiting to emerge. As if her lack of originality wasn't enough, she even steals the Doctor's lines directly from Trial and then tries to assassinate Iris by having her driver start to drive into a brick wall.

Bianca has some sort of mysterious hold on the Doctor as well, getting him to feel something for her. Very odd. Iris even has a tearful love confession where she's been hoping for years that the Doctor would notice her, but no such luck.

The finale comes when shadows start to emerge, taking people over just as the worms are taking people over through the alcohol. The shadows are the forms of what the worms would have evolved into if this freezing time moment didn't end up working. It's really sad. Wandering as a shadow, knowing that you could have had a form and knowing what it would have taken, but you are stuck in limbo forever. No wonder they're angry.

The Doctor realises that Bianca's is the remains of Iris's TARDIS and so uses his TARDIS to land inside it, causing a time ram, destroying it, sending everyone back to their own time, and stopping all of this nonsense for good. And then at the end it turns out that Mickey has been telling the story to the Seventh Doctor, who promises to take care of the tapes. Cute.

Iris is very fun, played masterfully by Katy Manning. It's no wonder that Big Finish decided to make Iris into a series in her own right. Katy Manning is charming, as always, and she plays Iris very differently to Jo. Where Jo is naive, Iris has seen it all and then some, drinking constantly for fun and to forget her troubles. She has amazing chemistry with Colin right off the bat, as if they've been playing off each other for years. The Doctor even mentions that he met Iris one time when Jo first left him.

I'm surprised that this exists at all to be honest. It's a brief little sidestep away from all the drama of Zagreus before we get back to it in the next story. It can be quite nonsensical at times, but that's the writers: Paul Magrs and Stephen Cole. They've both written other stories that are filled with technobabble or don't quite make sense. I'm surprised they were able to hold it together enough to make something halfway coherent here that works. It was a nice little diversion. It's a fun little story with a fun little character. Nothing special, but not bad either.

03.02.2023

Wow, that was shit. Derivative, loud and pointless.

Iris Wildthyme is insufferable. If there's a point to this character, it ain't here.

The twist is laughably bad. The two fractions of aliens are convoluted and ultimately unimportant. Highly skippable, 1/5.

I'm always a fan of Paul Magrs, though he has a rather particular format. A mad, over-the-top (and sometimes hard to follow) plot; bonkers ideas pulled together into some sort of sense with Iris Wildthyme swanning through the plot like a chaotic juggernaut.

The Wormery follows this format, but it's not quite as successful as Magrs' other work. There's an oddly grim tone to the whole thing, rather than his usual tone of surrealist comedy. The framing device an elderly Mickey telling the horrid tale to a mysterious investigator (who later turns out to be the Seventh Doctor) adds a layer of abstraction to an already overblown plot, and the layers of inter-worm (and shadow) politics leads the plot to be rather all over the place, and not in the fun way.

Iris having her own Valeyard-esque figure in Bianca isn't necessarily a bad choice; I just wish it were better executed. That said, I wish that the Valeyard himself were better executed as a dark reflection of the Doctor, too. Neither the Valeyard nor Bianca feel like a reflection (however twisted) of the character they purport to be – they just feel like rather two-dimensional baddies. Perhaps this is just personal preference, though. I can see how a dark reflection of Iris would be obsessed with order and stability, but I am fonder of a dark version of the character having their existing flaws twisted and exaggerated into wickedness, rather than being a simple opposite.

All that said, The Wormery is still a decent episode. I was never bored throughout it; it always had something fun to throw at me. Was it all one elaborate way to make an episode about wormholes having actual worms? Perhaps. But I find that sort of thing hilarious, so I won't complain.

I had a good time with the Wormery, having gone into the audio without knowing much about the story itself. This wound up being an early Iris Wildthyme story for me, and I'm glad it was so. Katy Manning does a good job and she is pretty funny, even if some of her lines are a little cringey. It's not the most remarkable audio in the world, but I found it entertaining and nicely paced out in such a way it was easy to follow and enjoy. I wish they had done more with the setting. The bar and the loungey feeling of the first half pretty quickly gives way to a more standard Doctor Who style adventure. I do like how Baker's Doctor was still coming to grips over his trial, though, and he bounced off of Manning well as a partner when they were in scenes together. Not much more to say for this one, other than that it starts out so solid only to gradually descend into a bit of a chore to get through. Colin Baker is just so reliable as the Doctor in these Big Finish audios.