Review: Doctor Who: The Lost Stories: The Prison in Space
- 9 hours ago
- 8 min read
By Matthew Kresal.
The making of a television series, like any creative endeavour, is not without its difficulties. Pitches that don’t quite work out and scripts that aren’t up to scratch are part of that experience. Doctor Who was no exception to that. Indeed, some eras being notable for their production woes and the latter part of Patrick Troughton’s tenure as the Time Lord was such a period with at least one serial being abandoned so late that full scripts existed. Called The Prison in Space, it would wait more forty years to be produced on audio as one of the more unusual entries in Big Finish’s The Lost Stories range.
Then again, the reasons why it wasn’t made are unusual in their own right. By 1968, Doctor Who was heading into its sixth season on air with Patrick Troughton entering his own third season. After a season focused largely on monsters and what would come to be known as “base under siege” plots, producer Peter Bryant sought out lighter fare for the following season. Settling on doing an outright comedy (something the series hadn’t done since The Romans in 1965), Bryant approached sitcom writer Dick Sharples. Sharples produced a 42-page story breakdown under the title The Amazons, involving a world where women have usurped men as the dominant sex with the world under the control of a female dictator, with the Doctor and Jamie eventual being sent to a prison space station under the control of “dolly guards.”
As time progressed, the storyline would go on to be not only tightened up but have five additional working titles (including The Strange Suffragettes) attached to it before being given its eventual title. Sharples would receive a script commission, submitting it by its deadline on the 2nd of September 1968, making changes to the script to accommodate the planned exit of Frazer Hines as Jamie and the introduction of a new companion.
While the first episode seemed to have gone down well with the production office, enough that Sharples began writing the other three episodes, events soon took a turn. Despite the initial reception, both Bryant and script editor Derrick Sherwin began to have second thoughts about Doctor Who doing an all-out comedy. In the meantime, Troughton had decided to leave the series at the end of his third season, causing Hines to decide he would stay and exit alongside Troughton. This necessitated rewrites, as did the growing discontent with the comedic material being delivered. A feeling that was soon shared by David Maloney, who had been assigned as director for the serial and had already begun casting. With Sharples still doing rewrites to the latter three scripts, a decision was made by the production team in early October to replace The Prison in Space with a storyline called The Space Trap that had been submitted by Robert Holmes and discovered by incoming script editor Terrance Dicks (it would develop into The Krotons).
Sharples wasn’t informed of events until the scripts for the later episodes had been delivered, with Bryant claiming they hadn’t been asked for because of the cancellation, leading to a dispute that was eventually resolved by the BBC contracts department who paid Sharples for his work. The experience left a bitter taste in the writer’s mouth, vowing that he would never try to write for Doctor Who again, while The Krotons became among Troughton’s final serials as the Doctor.
The Prison in Space disappeared for a quarter century. It wasn’t until 1993, after the series had gone off the air and Doctor Who Magazine began looking for material to fill its pages, including material on unmade serials, that it resurfaced. Richard Bignall had been able to uncover the original storyline and having condensed it into a smaller page count, presented it across consecutive issues (198 and 199) of the magazine in April and May 1993 with illustrations by Paul Vyse. The articles presented the comedic intent Sharples had brought, from the villainess Chairman Babs developing a crush on the Doctor, Jamie having to disguise himself as one of the dolly guards in the third episode, and a brainwashed Zoe being broken of her conditioning by Jamie giving her a hard spanking. All of which, as Bignall noted in issue 198, suggests how much of a role Sharples attempt at satire and outright comedy might have played in the serial being unmade.
In time, the original scripts would uncovered by Bignell, leading to him not only passing copies to Hines but also publishing them in a scriptbook as part of his Nothing at the End of the Lane fanzine (which remains available as a PDF through the fanzine’s website).
And so things might have remained if two further developments hadn’t occurred. The first was that in 2008, Big Finish Productions began a new range of releases under the banner of Doctor Who – The Lost Stories. Initially focusing on unmade stories from the era of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor, the company’s attention soon turned to the unproduced scripts from other Doctors. The second was that Frazer Hines, who had been working with Big Finish on new stories as Jamie in their Companion Chronicles range, rediscovered his copies of The Prison in Space scripts and called Big Finish founder/executive producer Jason Haigh-Ellery to suggest producing them for the range. That lead Lost Stories producer David Richardson to get Sharples permission to produce them before Simon Guerrier was commissioned to bring it to audio.
Released with the unmade Dalek spin-off pilot script The Destroyers in a box-set in December 2010, Big Finish’s The Prison in Space makes for curious listening. The eventual scripts were, as Bignell had predicted in 1993, very different from the original storyline. Details shift, including Zoe’s spanking being moved a little earlier and a reworking of the finale to bring it back down to Earth instead of being set exclusively on the space station. For better or worse, however, sequences such as Jamie in drag or Chairman Babs’ schoolgirl crush on the Doctor leading to a comedic chase remain very much in place.
The format also makes this a curiosity. Produced at a time before the company had embraced the idea of re-casting roles played by deceased cast members, the serial is presented instead as an enhanced talking book in the style of the proceeding First Doctor Lost Stories boxset. Guerrier essentially novelized Sharples 1968 scripts with Hines and Wendy Padbury (who played companions Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot, respectively) reprising their TV roles while serving as narrators, with Hines also voicing Troughton’s Doctor. Hines and Padbury, having done similar jobs elsewhere for the Companion Chronicles, were well versed in the semi-dramatic/semi-narrated format, with Hines having a well-earned reputation among fans for his, at times, uncanny recreation of Troughton. Something that is on full display here with Hines channelling the more light-hearted side of Troughton’s Doctor alongside a vocal recreation that genuinely becomes uncanny in how well it captures Troughton. Nor is Hines any less adept either as Jamie or as narrator, making it easy to distinguish which role he’s taking on even when all three are appearing in the same scene. Padbury likewise shines as both Zoe and as narrator, capturing not only her performances as a young actress decades earlier but also bringing a fair chunk of the story to life in the scenes around Zoe. All of which adds nicely to recreating the Troughton era in this format and something that, from the behind the scenes extras, something that Hines in particular especially enjoyed bringing to life.
Like the First Doctor Lost Stories set that proceeded it, the two surviving 1960s cast members are joined by a third voice, in this case Susan Brown as Chairman Babs. To Brown’s credit, she certainly does the most she can with the material given by Sharples and Guerrier. Babs is a throaty, sexist, over the top character, one clearly intended to be a satire of the likes of Stalin from a cult of personality portraying her as the maternal heart of the future world state to infighting among potential successors just waiting for the life-extending drugs keeping her alive to finally stop working. But the writing never allows for menace, despite the power she clearly wields, only presenting her as a comedic figure with a schoolgirl crush on the Doctor that reaches its natural and over the top conclusion in the final scene. Something which, as Guerrier notes, leaves the character as a one-note villain and not an especially memorable one, despite Brown’s efforts.
Something can be said for the entire production as a whole. Guerrier as adapter does an admirable job bringing what was quite a visual and even slapstick script to life as an audiobook, something that’s clear from an early scene with Harold Lloyd style antics where the prose makes it very easy to imagine Troughton doing some comedy bits. Written before the First Doctor Lost Stories box set (though released after), Guerrier also set the template for what would follow in releases featuring the first three Doctors in the range over the following couple of years, mixing descriptive prose with dramatized scenes. On the post-production front, David Darlington’s sound design and score capture the era well both in terms of sound effects and the music with the latter capturing Dudley Simpson’s emerging style for the series that would become hallmarks in the 1970s. In that regard, The Prison in Space can be regarded as a success.
There is a double edge to that particular sword, however. As director Lisa Bowerman notes in the extras, the original scripts from Sharples were very much ‘of their time’, a rather generous assessment as the mentions of “votes for men” and the extreme role reversals make this feel less like a 1960s script and something written decades earlier when suffragettes would have been dominating newspaper headlines. That Sharples wrote the Doctor taking strong sexist stances that Guerrier transferred to Jamie in the adaptation (something that, as likewise noted in the extras, likely would have changed anyway if the scripts had been made in the late 1960s) speaks to that as well. The comedy sometimes works (such as the aforementioned Harold Lloyd scene in the first episode) but often doesn’t when it goes for outright broad comedy fare (such as the extended sequence with Jamie in drag that, while it has one or two moments, goes on too long and stretches credulity in places). Combined with the cliches of 1950s and 1960s sci-fi present (“futuristic” cities both on the Earth and in space and brainwashing among them), The Prison in Space very much fits Bowerman’s description and rarely in an endearing way, especially listening to it in 2026.
It is far from some lost classic, nor is it the only time that the Lost Stories are a little too much of their time on the sexism front. Something which speaks both to the care and respect that Big Finish put into bringing them to life but also part of why something like The Prison in Space wasn’t made for the show to begin with. Perhaps, though, fans should be thankful for its loss for another reason all together. The Prison in Space being dropped allowed Robert Holmes first scripts for Doctor Who to be produced, leading to serials during the Pertwee era that led to him becoming script editor during Tom Baker’s first three seasons and continuing to write for the show up to his passing in 1986. During which Holmes produced scripts such as Spearhead from Space, The Ark in Space, The Deadly Assassin, and The Caves of Androzani. Would Holmes have had such a chance if The Krotons hadn’t been needed to fill such a gap? Would he ever have written for the series at all?
Doctor Who without Robert Holmes? It’s scarcely worth thinking about.
Matthew Kresal is, among other things, the author of the SLP book Our Man on the Hill and short stories in the anthologies AlloAmericana, The Emerald Isles, and The Scottish Anthology.
Comments