Doctor Who - Day of the Troll. (2009)

Title – Doctor Who – The Day of the Troll
Author – Simon Messingham
Publisher – BBC Audio
Format – CD
Year – 2009
Original Cost – £9.78

As we’ve established already, I’ve got a bit of thing for creatures of wood and root.  And if I recall correctly, it was the cover art for this particular CD that was the deciding factor in me finally buying it.  I like Doctor Who and I like stories on audio but there is so much of it that I’ve neither the time nor the shelf space to  amass anything other than a very choice collection.

For me this seemed like a nice one-off, read by the then current Doctor, set on a future Earth and with some sort of folkloric plant-based monster in it. It ticked a lot of boxes and delivered on all of them as it happened. I must have listening to this a half a dozen times since purchase and two of those were in the last month.

As previously mentioned, the story is set in a deserted future England where a group of scientists are trying to make the barren land fertile again.  The nation had previously fled to warmer southerly climes in response to a second ice age but with its retreat, and the world’s food supplies dwindling, its essential that the scientists are successful in their endeavors.  The base of operations for their experiments is The Grange, the family home  and estate of their leader, Karl Baring.  As the story starts Karl is snatched and possessed by an ancient power that resides in the dark beneath an old stone bridge.  The nightmarish abduction is witnessed by his terrified sister who flees only to run literally into The Doctor’s arms.  And thus are we set up for a pleasingly solid bit of storytelling via Simon Messingham’s words and Tennent’s absolutely top-draw narration with a host of pleasing characters voices to boot!

But apart from that why is it so good?

Firstly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this feels very like it could have been a two-part television adventure within the 10^th Doctor’s tenure.  It has the same edgy unnerving sci-fi horror vibe as of The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit or Human Nature / Family of Blood.  And it also has that slight tonal shift between the two halves, giving them an individual flavour that makes them feel independently valid rather than just two halves of one long story.  Its perfect New Who

And perhaps paradoxically, it also feels like it could be a 3^rd or 4^th Doctor story as well. And that’s not to say its derivative, as I’ve read in some reviews, but rather that it taps into some of the key tropes of those earlier times.  I could just as easily imagine Pertwee or Baker’s incarnations getting to grips with this adventure in their respective eras, as readily as Tennent does in his.  I think that’s quite a neat trick, because what it basically means is that it’s a quintessential Doctor Who story.

Having picked this for the blog, I was interested to see how others felt about it. While favourable on the whole, it still seemed to pick up some accusations of being too similar to Tom Baker’s Seeds of Doom story, especially with the origin and evolution of the main alien protagonist. (Doctor Who Monthly #415)  I actually think that’s a somewhat lazy and short-sighted take, given where that 1976 story had drawn its influences from.  The Krynoids of The Seeds of Doom are at the very least riffing off the same dreadful fate as befalls Victor Carroon in Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment.   And I would also argue only then because it’s a striking transformation and achievable on the small screen.  But there the similarities end.  Obviously DOTT is audio only which is why, when you consider the transformation of Karl Bearing into the Troll a little more closely, there isn’t especially any comparisons between the two either.  So all that those reviews are latching onto really, is the fact that it’s another plant based alien life-form taking over a human a host.  Which is a thin comparison to say the least and the same kind of reductive thinking that gets 28 Days Later labelled as a zombie film.

Which Segues, not unintentionally, into my next point about DOTT and the reason it feels comfortably familiar. Which is that as well as being classically Doctor Who in its plotting, it’s actually a nice big slice of that unique British Sci-fi tradition of catastrophe fiction that was so prevalent in the 1950s and then bled into the next decades film and television.

Just as 28 Days Later owes a lot to John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and yet fails to show us one killer plant, so does DOTT owe a nod of respect to John Christopher’s, Death of Grass or even The World in Winter for the Britain into which the Doctor arrives.

And that’s also probably really where the Nigel Kneale connection comes in as well.  Those three named authors helped to set the ground rules for that unique brand of post War mid-century apocalyptic slow invasion fiction into which this particular Doctor Who story so easily sits. 

Off the top of my head I can only think of one similar earth based Doctor Who story where the disaster has already run its course and the Doctor is merely helping the survivors, rather that averting the catastrophe in the first place and that’s The Sontaran Experiment. A wonderfully bleak two-parter from Tom Baker’s first season.  As a set up for a story its doesn’t feature too often in the show because the Doctor, as a full-on hero figure, is meant to save the day, not arrive after the fact.  So DOTT starts off in quite an interestingly dark place.

All of which has probably illustrated another of my lifelong story obsessions. That of pre and post-apocalyptic fiction. I’m sure we’ll explore it at length later on but in summary its origins are most often the world wars.  But as those that survived that time penned their respective fears into fictions, for those of us growing up afterwards through the tensions of the Cold War aftermath, we saw those fictions as potential realities.  Realities that were only ever three minutes away.  And if not the bomb, then the environmental backlash of some ecological horror that were also usually made manifest in someone else’s cautionary tale.

And here were we thinking we were just talking about a Doctor Who CD when in fact we were talking about the echo

Steve