Monday, November 2, 2009

7th Doctor - Dust Breeding

Serial 7T - Bust Reading
Bust Reading
Alternate Programme Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
An Extract From The EC Unauthorized Guide O' Egg Collecting

D O C T O R W H O

Serial 7T - Bust Reading



Part One

The TARDIS is on route for Duchamp's Urinal, a mysterious asteroid carved out in the shape of a urinal by forces unknown for a purpose even more unknown.

The Doctor is more interested, however, in the fact that Ace has moved from ruining his library to his art gallery – which he stocks with paintings, sculptures and treasures looted, Time Bandit-style, from various historical figures and doomed art galleries.

Duchamp's Urinal is also the destination for Bev Tarrant and ex-Special Weapons Dustbin Zeg the Sexy. It's their honeymoon, and, with luck the Doctor and Ace won't follow and there most be a mysterious alien death monster trying to kill them all.

They then meet a strange, twitchy and rather consumptive-sounding green alien with one eye whose appearance is best described as 'suspicious-looking'. This is Alpha Sintauri, who has an extended tour on Duchamp's Urinal even though hir detests the very thought of being there. Mainly because if hir transferred, Sintauri would have a lot less to complain about.

The Doctor finally snaps and decides to kick Ace out of the TARDIS until she realizes that destroying other people's property is a mortal sin – well, as long as said property is HIS.

The TARDIS has landed near the plughole of Duchamp's Urinal, where a strange being called Ja-Ja-Binks lies drowning in a stain the size of Birmingham. Clearly whatever god-like being last used the facilities forgot to flush afterwards, the filthy little pervert.

The Doctor and Ace peer out the doorway at the stricken Binks, as strange screams fill the air and a hideous storm of urine gushes near the plughole. Then they point, laugh and then head off to the nearest pub The Piece O' Piss. There they meet Bev and Zeg.

The Doctor originally wanted to come here to add Duchamp's Urinal to the TARDIS, but he thinks this lavatorial brand of humor a bit low brow. "It'll be farting aliens next," he warns.

Elsewhere, the opulent starship Bourgeois Decadence is preparing to depart for its adventure cruise to Duchamp's Urinal, but its departure is delayed by the late arrival of a passenger.

The owner of the Bourgeois Decadence, Salvador Dali (whose severed head has been kept alive in a jar) is perfectly willing to leave him behind, at least until she learns that the tardy passenger is the mysterious Mr. Astbrad, who is helping to fund the journey.

When the voyage gets underway, Dali addresses his passengers and patrons – but he's so off the wall no one can understand a bloody word he says so they just ignore him and bid on priceless works of art, get roaringly drunk and make use of the vomitorium.

Mr. Astbrad and his pet sea lion arrive and complain about the lack of complimentary fish in the mini-bar, and Dali's aide Gustav "Fat Bastard" Klimt wonders if this is relevant to the plot.

Back on Duchamp's Urinal, Ace asks Bev about the strange screaming in the air, and Bev explains that it's the sound of the native urine sharks, evolved from the graffiti scrawled in the giant urinal over the millennia. Sintauri suggests that the screaming is not urine sharks but, instead, the damned souls of Dustbins who died of old age trying to clean out the urinal to no avail. The screams are the sound of Dustbin madness, carried on the wind.

Sintauri reveals he has proof of this, a huge statuette consisting entirely of two breasts big enough to park a planet hopper on. The Doctor announces he didn't come to this godforsaken rock to steal this 'bust'... but he's going to do it anyway!

Ace notices some curious scratches on the underside of one of the breasts and begins stroking it with her fingers. This causes her to make curious noises. Dear God, you think if they were going to dramatize porno-fics, they'd be a tad more interesting!

Back on the Bourgeois Decadence, security guard Albert Bootle is complaining to himself about his split personality disorder when he bumps into Mr. Astbrad's Sea Lion, which promptly aims a blaster at him and reduces him to a tiny, doll-like corpse.

This is later auctioned as a miniature of Michaelangelo's David done by some blind Japanese peasants. It easily reaches the reserve price.

Just when things can't get any more baffling or surreal, a tidal wave of urine smashes through the windows of Sintauri's gallery, and the screaming form of Jar Jar Binks burst into the chamber!



Part Two

Earth. Wales. The end of the twenty-first century. And, in the office of Mister B'Stard, union rep Hal Toller is hurling abuse at him for daring to open up an amusement park in a seaside village.

After the argument establishes this fact, Toller sods off to the pub and whinges a bit more exposition about the weird happenings of late which he puts down entirely to B'Stard. With this established, Toller sods out of the pub and go to the political mafia in Cardiff and in his office B'Stard watches this by webcam.

Toller passed the local vicar, Dars Bat, repeats some exposition, before crossing the dark and deadly moor to get to his shed. The vicar pops down to the crypt and begins a diabolic ceremony which summons up the elemental force of a sea lion which attacks Toller before he can exposit any more drivel!

The TARDIS lands beside a mammoth. Any hope for whacky pre-historic hi-jinks is ruined because it's a fake mammoth in a Welsh museum. The curator Stab Dar, greets them and exposits about all the usual bollocks you find in conspiracy magazines before announcing that the pagan statue of a sea lion was stolen last week.

Ace is disgusted at the thought of a place wild, remote, wet and populated entirely of sheep. So when she learns they're just off Swansea, she tries to flee back to the TARDIS. Hysterically she insists that the theft's a publicity stunt, the local witches coven the women's institute and the curator a git.

"There's nothing going on here!" she insists as an earthquake starts.

In his church, the vicar says the end of the world is coming. His congregation immediately flee to the pub and get plastered on booze. And B'Stard exposits with Nurse Drabsta that it's got nothing to do with him. At all. Toller runs into the museum, screams, then falls over and dies in an unconvincing manner.

The Doctor faints, claiming he can sense something fishy from the dawn of time breaking loose – and worse, he's locked his key inside the TARDIS again!

The entire population of the town storm the museum with pitch forks and shout that the TARDIS crew are Satanists in league with B'Stard, and the Doctor denies this by stealing the one car in the village with leaded petrol in it (and thus the only car that works) and heading straight for B'Stard's plant. The vicar watches this and strokes his beard, chuckling.

Suddenly, a sea lion leaps onto the road and attacks the car. The Doctor realizes that this is the work of his old enemy...

...THE BASTARD!!



Part Three

The starship Bourgeois Decadence approaches Duchamp's Urinal. Meanwhile, the Doctor's sinister fondling of the breast statues causes an alien presence to enter his mind - the ultimate weapon, the scream of the madman, every death Ace can ever imagine, it is...

The Dilithium Crystals!

A weapon so utterly deadly and ruthless, its creators took one look at it and got turned on. And so it was sent into the depths of time and space, wounded and weary, and sought refuge in the mind of an artist on the planet Earth; but the man's mind snapped at its touch, the Crystals was tainted with his madness, and somehow, the artist exorcised the mental energy which had possessed him into his erotic sculpture.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

The Dilithium Crystals has been dormant within the sculpture ever since, but now it has woken again, for its been fondled repeatedly by visitors. It cannot waste time or energy struggling with the Doctor, so it releases him – much to his intense disappointment.

Aboard the Bourgeois Decadence ballroom, Dali watches on with mild interest as a sea lion reduces all the passengers into shrunk doll-like corpses and begins to play with them, speaking in silly voices and making them slap each other in Monty Python routines.

Worse, Klimt is now under the hypnotic control of the man she knows as Astbrad – but this is merely an android created by the Bastard, naturally ashamed of his seal-like appearance.

The Bastard plans to use an erotic sculpture on the Urinal below in a fashion so unspeakably horrible even Dali feels nauseous.

The Doctor realizes that Sintauri intends to release the Dilithium Crystals into the urine, which – should so much as one spear of asparagus be added – turn into a tidal wave of the most disgusting substance known to life kind.

At this point, the Doctor pops off back to the TARDIS without telling anyone where he's going, dives inside and takes off like a bullet in the ass of a bat out of hell. The time machine wheezes and groans as it reappears on the Bourgeois Decadence – surely it can't be as eye-burstingly weird as the situation on Duchamp's Urinal.

Ace and Bev flee the world in Zeg's ship, leaving Sintauri hanging around his boob-edifice, staring longingly at it with his one eye. Zeg's ship docks with the Bourgeois Decadence just as the Doctor cautiously pokes his head out of the TARDIS.

And, there, before him is a familiar sea lion.

This has been yet another of the Bastard's evil plans, and this time, the Doctor is too late to stop him...

No. Wait. There's another episode.

Yup, I guess the Doctor might just win this time. Again.




Part Four

The Doctor and the Bastard have crossed paths yet again, as it seems they always will. And each time, despite the threats and insults, the obvious sexual attraction between them bubbles up to the surface and for one longing moment they pause in their eternal battle to wonder simply what MIGHT have been...

And the Bastard is a sea lion. Again.

Past experience leaves the Bastard unsurprised that the Doctor has survived the attention of the Dilithium Crystals, even though the Bastard himself wasn't quite so lucky. Having conquered Gallifrey and become Lord President, the Bastard located a curious bit of objets d'art – resembling a bust cast of Dolly Parton – which the evil Time Lord decided to place in his study for 'closer examination'.

However, the moment he, er, 'examined it', the Dilithium Crystals awoke and stripped him of his borrowed Trakenite body, reducing him to his former sea-lion-shaped self before dozing off.

Not even the people of Gallifrey would accept a god damned sea lion as Lord President as the Bastard was deposed in disgrace. This was the enigmatic and highly amused news that the wacky Time Lord known as the Magician told the Doctor on Parrot-Shat in The Jazzocize Machine. Seemed pretty extraneous at the time, didn't it, but there was really a point to it the whole time!

Now the Bastard has manipulated the situation on Duchamp's Urinal so that the Dilithium Crystals are sucked out of the bust sculpture, the Bastard will be able to capture it and... enjoy it at his leisure. OK, this will release an ancient and devastating weapon on the cosmos, but YOU try explaining the finer points of cause and effect to a fish-eating porpoise-shagger!!

Meanwhile, Bev, Zeg and Ace find the shaken Dali making a pyramid out of miniturized human corpses which at the time was funny joke and not some disgusting commentary of America's treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Through the window, the massive urinal seems to be unflushing a massive wave of urine up out into the universe. Zeg gurgles and thanks the gods that it doesn't have an eyestalk to see this.

On the surface, Sintauri flushes every toilet hir can – but to no avail, as the Dilithium Crystal wave prepares to engulf the universe, just as it did on the planet it was created, leaving only one urinal intact. That would be the planet of giants then.

It pauses to laugh at Sintauri's phallic freak appearance.

Big mistake.

Sintauri reveals hir eye is in fact a mercury-level grenade, which hir promptly detonates.

As Duchamp's Urinal explodes, the Bastard realizes this whole trip has been a complete waste of time and then scurries into his TARDIS – shaped as a craps table in the casino.

The Doctor nervously laughs and explains that he didn't abandon his friends on Duchamp to face certain death, he veritably risked his life coming to face the Bastard face to face!

Then he and the others enter the TARDIS and take off. Aboard the ship, the Doctor emails a computer virus Kamelion picked up while surfing the web to the Bastard's TARDIS.

Stuck in the form of a sea lion, the Bastard is unable to click CTRL+ALT+DEL or defrag! His TARDIS goes out of control and plummets down a time abyss in a cheap negative effect.

Smugly, the Doctor drops off Bev and Zeg back on Parrot-Shat and notes the vast amount of art they have in their hand luggage. Ace points out that he probably shouldn't have brought a professional thief aboard the TARDIS and leave the door to his art gallery unlocked.

The Doctor buys a souvlaki and gurns sinisterly.


Book(s)/Other Related –
Doctor Who and the Breaststroker
Doctor Who Strokes Breasts (Canada Only)
Sea Lion Fondle Fetishist Monthly # 14

Fluffs – Sylvester McCoy seemed gropable in this story.
"This will be my bastard-piece! Sorry, MASTER piece..."

Goofs -
Life is far too short.
Most notably is the first episode of another story being recorded over the top of episode two, confusing the plot rather.

Fashion Victims – Zeg's pink neck scarf.

Technobabble -
The Doctor is totally flummoxed when, upon reversing the polarity in part one, the story continues for another three episodes.

Links and References -
The Doctor hasn't met Alpha Sintauri since The Bride of Paddington.

Untelevised Misadventures -
Ace single-handledly defeated an invasion of krill on the planet Coralee, by unleashing a pet sperm whale that swallowed the invasion force in one gulp.
Tucker turned this into a novel for BBC Books called Dorm Harvest.

Groovy DVD Extras -
Even more sinister chuckling by Sylvester McCoy.

Dialogue Disasters -

Doctor: Something on her bust. Or the bust itself...

Astbrad: Curiosity can be a very dangerous pastime. Rather like blindfolded dynamite fishing. Or baby oil twister.

Dialogue Triumphs -

Astbrad: This mask I wear can be misleading. People take it to mean I'm disabled, in some way, infirm perhaps. I assure you, I'm anything but. Now give me that fish.

Klimp: Who... who are you?
Astbrad: I AM THE BASTARD – AND YOU WILL OBEY ME!!!

UnQuotable Quote -
Zeg: Dear God, that's disgusting!

Viewer Quotes -

"Zeg's accent – thigh-slappingly over the top to begin with – veers away from Eastern Europe and tours around Ireland, Sweden and, particularly, the Welsh valleys. I feel like I've been on a world tour, so I can sit at home on the sofa from now on." - Global Tourism Monthly (2002)

"This has to be the Bastard's most believable appearance which is very impressive considering he's a fricken sea lion. But if I had Ace calling me 'the Seal of Rassilon' on a regular basis, then changing this would undoubtedly form the core of my personal mission statement." - Serge the Seal (2004)

"He's back - and unexpectedly too. Anthony Ainley's refusal to participate is our gain; Slappy the Sea Lion's spine-chilling voice adds an atmosphere to the adventure that Ainley could never have provided. Let's hope that this version of the Bastard will be back to confront the seventh Doctor again, soon." - Ewen Campion Clarke (2006 – because backdating my own quotes makes me look all cool and prescient!)

"Is this story in Season 27? I thought the first four McGann audios were Season 27! Or was it the Timwyrm series? Or Eccleston's first run? Is it all one freaking enormous Season 27 from Illiterate Alien to The Parting of the Legs? I CAN'T STAND THE CONFUSION IN MY MIND!" - John Preddle (2006)

"Crass is just a polite way of saying crap." - State of the Bleeding Obvious (1984)

"Blake's 7 did this story of sentient urine much better as a complete story in the Season 4 episode 'Piss Artist'." - Chris Hale (2005)

"This listener was wonderfully surprised and delighted with it all. Urine is underrepresented in science fiction and it is good to see this scandalous injustice finally being dealt with." - the local urologist (2003)

"Oh yeah. Sweet, sweet candy!" – Nigel Verkoff (2005)

Psychotic Nostalgia -
"It's a story you dare not take the piss out of! Because that's what it WANTS you to do! Oh, got it INSIDE MY SKULL! Where's that pick-axe! MUST – GET – IT – OOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Sylvester McCoy Speaks!
"What I like is the artistic side of it. There are all sorts of aside they threw in. Or rather, threw up. Even the use space urinal is named after an artist. What a mad idea. Like anyone would mistake a urinal for art! The very idea! As for the rest of the story, it's taking a wet dream and turning it into an erotic nightmare..."

Slappy the Sea Lion Speaks!
"I think that evil is absolute. It's pure evil. I came to the part of the Bastard with relish. I'd do it on TV if I were offered the chance. When I first did Doctor Who all those years ago, I could never have guessed that it'd still be going today... You're SURE Tom Baker isn't going to turn up? He totally creeps me out."

Trivia -
Alpha Sintauri was played by Shane Rimmer and Ed Bishop, providing the body and voice respectively.

Rumors & Facts -
Following what someone with no sense of reality might have termed 'success' of The Jazzocize Machine, Mike Tucker was asked to come up with a second story for Big Finish's Doctor Who range. He was keen to write a story featuring Palema Anderson's breasts and pitched this to Gay Russell with the very rough outline reprinted below:

"BOOBIES!!!!"

The basic premise was an ecological horror story called Nipples Rising, a Pertwee-era-style tale which would have seen the Bastard involved in a Pamela Anderson-related incident in a Welsh seaside village, with the Doctor and the Bastard being smothered by buxom bosoms somewhere during part three in a sequence so psychologically disturbing the evil Time Lords would unintentionally swap bodies.

One idea was that episode one begin with already happened, allowing the story to concentrate more on Anderson's cleavage while Sylvester McCoy chuckled evilly in the background.

Another idea was that there would be a number of characters that could conceivably be the Bastard in disguise – the extwaordinary vwicar, a corrupt industrialist, a local squire. Tucker got confused as to which one was really the evil Time Lord and so decided, in a novel move, to make ALL of them the Bastard, except for a thrash metal band made up from bored local kids.

Episode four would also feature Ace and Pamela Anderson's tits swap minds, which would be interesting to write to say the least.

Originally pegged to play the Bastard was Anthony Ainley, an actor who by staggering coincidence had played the character from 1981 to 89. However, he was approached only after Roger Delgado was discovered to be dead, Gordon Nipple was found to be dead and Eric Roberts found to be... well... Eric Roberts.

However, Anthony Ainley wasn't going to turn up at Big Finish without a fight – not only did he demand his fee contain enough cash to buy the Outer Hebrides, he wanted a Fleetwood Mac reunion, a helicopter, a packet of smoky bacon crisps, a signed portrait by Gilbert and George, a hat made out of cheese, a herd of Yaks speaking fluent French, thirteen photocopies of His Holiness the Pope's genitals, and for Tom Baker to stand on his head in the rain while facing North.

For Ainley to actually ACT in a play demanded even more outlandish demands – and not just financial ones. "It wasn't just money," a weird bloke at the pub reveals, "he was asking for more than twice the free jelly given to the Doctors, because he was worth twice as much as them. Which is kind of hard to argue. But he wanted casting approval. Script approval. Two teenage girls naked and wrestling in a pit of baked beans. A dictionary. Stuff that not even Gay Russell is allowed!"

When these facts were explained to Ainley via semaphore (he refused to sully his tongue with spoken languages) and demanded to be made dictator of a small Middle Eastern county before he would agree to continue further negotiations.

Finally, Russell and JHE told Ainley where he could go and decided it would be easier and not to mention less soul destroying for the story to feature the sea lion-incarnation of the Bastard as played by Slappy the Sea-Bound Mammal in the Tom Baker stories The Lethal Assassin and The Zoo-Keeper of Traken. Russell suggested that the Bastard have the Ainley body stripped away from him in an agonizing and quite unnecessarily violent manner – a thought which had crossed the producer's mind continuously while dealing with the actor himself.

Tucker's script was screwed anyway. The idea of Pamela Anderson's areolas had left him unable to write or even think for long periods, leaving Nipples Rising unfinished after its first episode.

After having his head repeatedly flushed in the toilet, Tucker was sentient enough to start a new story featuring the Sea Lion version of the Bastard, set at Sea World. This idea was scrapped because another story in the pipeline resembled this. This story was The Eyes of Scorpius but how the hell THAT resembles the Sea World idea, I have absolutely no idea.

Desperately, Tucker got his script for The Jazzercize Machine and ran it through FIND and REPLACE to change the Dustbins into the Bastard, the video shop into an art Bourgeois Decadence, the Magician into Alpha Sintauri, and Bev Tarrant and Zeg into themselves.

By a bizarre coincidence, this exactly storyline had been submitted to BBC Books as a novel in 2000 but range editor Steve Cole had been less than enthusiastic about a story revolving around giant PVC breasts, an insane Alpha Sintauri called Ralph McTell, a planet-sized dirty urinal and two art dealers called Garpol and Blint Backslash.

This demonstrates the wide chasm of quality that separates the books and the audios.

It was during recording that Russell remember that he announced his manifesto at the start of Big Finish – along with no Dustbin/Lavros stories, new companions for old Doctors, story arcs or dabbling in non-TV continuities – that the Bastard would never ever ever ever never appear in Big Finish never never ever.

Thus, there was a desperate scramble to hide the fact that the Bastard was in the story. They cast Slappy the sea lion as Astbrad and put far more media attention on the return of Bev Tarrant and her special weapons Dustbin boyfriend Zeg. The plan was that fans would believe the return of the Bastard was nothing more than an LSD flashback on their behalf, and Big Finish hadn't done a thing wrong.

Due to some weird crap happening with the story Mud Ride, the release of Bust Reading was brought forward by a month. The writing was great, the performances stellar, the score bowel-shatteringly astounding and delightful. The fact it had a naked torso shot of Pamela Anderson on the cover is a complete coincidence.

It is in fact down to the fact that Jac Raynor provided the voice for the computer. Her voice is... very nice.

Seriously. If they released DWM's The Time Team on audio, it would be the fastest selling merchandise in history.

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