Friday, December 4, 2009

8th Doctor - Memory Lane (i)

Serial 9C – Baker Street
An Alternative Program Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
Twenty-Ninth Entry in the EC Unauthorized Guide O' Demmed Colonials
"Motorcycle Saint Sebastian" lyrics by the Doug Anthony Allstars


D O C T O R W H O

Serial 9C – Baker Street -


Part One – Penny Lane

The TARDIS has arrived in a squalid Welsh bedsit where a backward thirty-year old called Tom Braudy is playing with Lego, while snooker is shown on the television and his care worker gets violently drunk and runs up a massive telephone bill ringing Taiwanese Clown Sex Lines.

Emerging from the TARDIS, the Doctor is already regretting the necessary sacrifices to avoid fighting in the Temporal Difference of Opinion, forced to hide in Cardiff of all places. What’s more, instead of verdant countryside and pleasantly daft racial stereotypes, they are immediately confronted by a mentally retarded bachelor and his clown-abusing social worker.

It’s enough to tempt C’Rizz to flee back inside the TARDIS. However, the Doctor loves the idea of watching snooker so much he immediately raids the fridge, slumps on the couch and puts his feet up on Tom. As Charley and C’Rizz watch on, the Time Lord makes himself at home and starts shouting abusive advice at the TV about "big" breaks and "bigger on the inside" breaks.

Charley nags the Doctor, suggesting they go outside and look for alien mischief and maybe have a curry and some sex, but the Doctor bitches that he is comfortable - and being dragged away from watching the snooker when you’re comfortable was the cause of at least fourteen major interplanetary wars.

"Course, the always SAY it’s down to politics or assassinations or economic expansion, but when all’s said and done and the shouting’s stopped, we know the truth! Isn’t that right, C’Rizz?"

It is at this point they realize C’Rizz left the flat fifteen minutes ago, overexcited at the prospect of a passing ice cream van.

C’Rizz, uncertain as how human manners deal with the buying and selling of frozen confectionery, charges the ice cream van, kung-fu kicks all the prospective customers unconscious, and then threatens to slash the seller’s throat if he doesn’t "get the fuck out of the van". Apparently this is stiffly formal and polite ice cream bartering by Eutermisan standards.

C’Rizz steals the ice cream van and drives off, laughing like a maniac as he scoffs all the Sky Ray Lollies and sticks all the trading cards on his jacket so he becomes a walking Season 6b story entitled "Dr Who and the Sky Ray Lollies Blow Up Centipedes on the Planet Zactus!"

C’Rizz then ram-raids a pet store, mistakenly believing it to be an illegal gambling den where snails are forced to wrestle in unnecessarily violent and bloody fights. When he learns his mistake, he gets upset and munches a Zoom with a dark expression.

Meanwhile, Charley looks out the window at the drizzling, dreary street of identical houses, dotted with twitching corpses of the customers C’Rizz accidentally reversed over.

The Doctor tells Charley to shut up and get used to it, as she is blocking his view of the snooker. Charley storms over to the kitchen, slips and falls out the window into the alleyway behind.

Charley is thoroughly disoriented to discover an identical flat beneath the other one, containing the same alcoholic social worker and the same backward thirty-year old playing with Lego. The snooker ends and is replaced by an episode of Space: 1999.

Whereupon the Doctor swears loudly, picks up the TV and hurls it out the window, flattening one of the few pedestrians to be spared by C’Rizz reenacting Grand Theft Auto 2.

The Doctor storms out of the flat and goes upstairs to get out on the roof, have a smoke and brood like all good telefantasy characters do. He is, however, shocked to discover the roof... is another flat identical to the one he left, even boasting the same moronic inhabitants. However, the TV is intact and showing the snooker, so the Doctor slumps on the couch and blanks out yet again.

Charley approaches the ice cream van where C’Rizz is idly spitting in all the ice cream vats. C’Rizz explains he has decided to start an army of reptilian ice cream vendors, and when Charley points out the evil aliens of Mars do it professionally, C’Rizz gets all depressed and quits the entire business.

They decide to head back to the Doctor, but all the houses the look identical. After a convenient amount of padding involving them checking lots of identical flats, they encounter a flat with more than two people in it – unfortunately, the third person is not the Doctor but Nasty Linda, who looks like a failed Eastenders character.

Nasty Linda pulls out a gun-shaped prop and threatens to blow both their heads off. Charley screams and runs out of the flat, closes the door and barricades it, trapping C’Rizz with a psychopath. Whether this is sheer absentmindedness or some cunning vengeance we may never know.

Nasty Linda orders C’Rizz at gunpoint to eat some biscuits. When he refuses, she fires the gun. She misses C’Rizz entirely, but the Eutermisan wets himself and faints dead away.

Charley runs up to the roof and finds another flat. In this particular flat, the Doctor is rolling a huge joint on a Blue Oyster Cult album, and watching an episode of Blake’s 7.

Charley desperately insists that fighting the combined armies of every Dustbin faction in existence must be better than living in this demented Escher landscape of drunken Welsh imbeciles!

The Doctor thinks Charley is getting WAY too worried and tells her to mellow out and enjoy a spliff.

However, all this turns out to be a hallucination the Doctor is having AFTER he smoked said spliff. Dazed, he heads downstairs and passes a vengeful ice cream salesman hauling a police box down the stairs. Waving a greeting to him, the Doctor heads into the flat and is shocked to find the TARDIS has been stolen!

Using his super Time Lord intelligence, the Doctor comes to an incredible conclusion!

The TARDIS has been stolen by the ice-cream man!


Part Two – Baker Street

Trying drunkenly to find a toilet, the Doctor stumbles out into the street and meets Charley. They are both at such a loose end they go to Louigi’s Fish Finger Emporium where there is also snooker coverage.

Despite the fact the story has explained most of the plot already, the Doctor and Charley can only wonder – who are the strange people in the flats? Why have they been cloned six thousand times? Why is there nothing but snooker? And does goat’s milk taste better than raw sewage?

C’Rizz wakes up to find he has been tied to a crucifix hanging from the ceiling and Nasty Linda is lying on a couch. She explains she’s not REALLY called Nasty Linda, but is in fact Kim Krotonska, an Australian backpacker.

She is convinced that they have somehow arrived in the middle of a Cardiff soap opera called "Baker Street", which unfortunately is the least imaginative soap opera ever! It only has two incredibly dull and pathetic characters who watch snooker all day while getting drunk.

Kim muses that since the whole of Cardiff City has been filled with clones locked in a strange twilight version of hell, where every house is identical and time folds around itself, the soap opera must be incredibly popular and justifies a 24/7 live broadcast and, in order to keep up with demand.

Glad that clumsy exposition is out of the way, C’Rizz bursts free of his bonds, does a summersault, lands on his feet after a devastating series of roundhouse kicks to Kim’s head, he steals a gun and shoots her through the head, before back-flipping out the kitchen window.

Tragically, that turned out to be an ice-cream fueled hallucination and C’Rizz is still nailed to the ceiling.

After a brutal fight over the last remaining fish finger, Charley sulks and heads to the other side of the diner, where she is mildly surprised to find her niece Polly Wright and her latest boy toy, Ben Jackson, a Ready, Willing and Able seaman.

Charley is so used to bumping into her niece in strange dream like realms she doesn’t even question this and idly asks if she can crash at their place in return for some Tantric Sex lessons. They accept and Charley flips the Doctor the bird as they leave.

At a loss of what to do, the lonely Time Lord shrugs, changes the channel on the TV and watches an episode of Hazel and goes cross-eyed trying to understand the rhyming Cockney slang.

Bored to tears, C’Rizz starts to sing out of tune every single poem he has ever written. After the 227th stanza of "Felicity Is Electricity In My Genital Region", Kim starts screaming and banging her head against the floor and then jumps out of the third-story window.

C’Rizz sighs and realizes he can hear sounds from the apartment above – the sound of Charley, Polly and Ben having an incredibly kinky threesome. C’Rizz just sighs and turns on his iPod incredibly loud, and soon Moby’s "Lift Me Up!" is blaring out loudly.

The music totally ruins the mood and the indignant Charley storms downstairs to complain, wearing only some whipped cream. At first, she doesn’t recognize C’Rizz, but then she suddenly projectile vomits up at him with such force he is wrenched free of the crucifix and falls to the ground.

As Charley looms over C’Rizz, he is gripped with terror.

"That wasn’t morning sickness again, was it?!" he exclaims.

Charley thinks for a moment, then puts it down to the incredibly out of date fish fingers she has been eating, plus the fact she’s become bulimic in her spare time.

The Doctor, gripped with a sudden desire to play a saxophone, runs out into the street, and notices Kim lying sprawled in the street. Idly, he asks her if she has any brass wind instruments about her person, but to no avail.

The Doctor notes that the only way Kim could have survived the fall from the window was if the gravitational constant of the universe changed... or if they were not actually in Cardiff on Earth.

The Time Lord smacks his forehead – the TARDIS navigation computer has cocked up again. Instead of Cardiff on Earth, it’s Cardiff on another planet entirely. "It’s not the first time it’s happened," he admits grimly. "I remember that time I set the coordinates for Paris and ended up at Paris in Texas rather than Paris in France."

This means that Charley and C’Rizz owe him an apology for their bitching in the previous episode, so the Doctor immediately heads up to the apartment, following Charley’s vomit stains.

The Doctor bursts in and explains that they are actually in some incredibly demented idea of suburban Hell, like in that episode of Angel, with the prisoner not even aware he is a prisoner. Obviously Tom Braudy has been imprisoned in this twilight realm – he doubts Kim is the prisoner since Australian backpackers turn up EVERYWHERE and, frankly, if there wasn’t one present here, he’d start to panic.

Charley muses that the prison seems pretty pathetic. Where are the horrors of the shower room? The angry cell mates? The humiliating wardens? All this place does is bore people into a happy stupor – it might be more human locking people up in tiny cells, but it’s not half as sadistic or amusing.

C’Rizz notes that it is clearly effecting all of them... unless maybe all the drugs they keep smoking are distorting their perceptions. Are Ben and Polly really in the flat above? Or is it some strange kinky fantasy on Charley’s part.

The Doctor grimaces at the thought and declares everything about this incident morally wrong, though admits he’s intrigued about the incest threesome, it’s probably not a good idea to let on about this.

The trio immediately plan to leave in the TARDIS before realizing even if they knew which flat it was in, the time machine was nicked by an ice cream man in the previous cliffhanger.

Everyone smacks C’Rizz over the head, as it was his fault for alerting the guard to their presence by trying to steal his ice cream van and use it to trash up the city.

The Doctor’s plan to draw the ice-cream van back is for them to stand in the street and shout "Cor, I’d like an ice cream right about now, funk soul brother!" a lot.

Kim finds this incredibly humiliating and pops into the nearest flat to take out her frustration by repeatedly shooting the drunken carer as he sits naked on the couch eating dorritoes.

C’Rizz announces suddenly he can hear the sound of distant drums, and the block of flats explodes since the Doctor accidentally left the gas on in one apartment.

The singed, soot-stained figures watch the burning ruins.

"Whoops," the Doctor muses.



Part Three – Streets of London

The Doctor clears his throat and, for want of something to do, checks if everyone else is all right. Bored with the outcome, he tells the others about the time he and Led Zeppelin invaded Phobos.

Tom staggers from the rubble demanding to know what the hell happened, and the Doctor suggests that maybe this is divine retribution for going around, leaving crisp packets everywhere.

This shuts up Tom and so the quartet stand around, waiting for the arrival of the ice-cream van.

Finally, C’Rizz gets bored and propositions Kim, suggesting they make the "Oroog With Three Backs" in one of the less demolished flats. It seems at first that Kim is really up for the idea, but she just wants to humiliate C’Rizz by telling him to head for the nearest cupboard, take off his clothes, put a paper bag on his head, and await further instructions.

C’Rizz runs off as the others shake their head and mutter "Tosser!".

Struggling to pass the time, Charley demands to know if there is a room aboard the TARDIS full of arm chairs, the Doctor debates the wikipedia definition of hyperspace, and Tom notices that a big black hairy thing with huge fangs is lurking in the rubble.

At that moment, the ice cream van arrives, and Tom immediately jumps aboard and tells the driver, Lest, to step on it. The van hurtles away, leaving the others at the mercy of this story’s token monster as the Doctor shakes his fist and swears furiously.

The monster looms closer and there is a predictable chase scene as the Doctor and Charley attempt to find sanctuary with Ben and Polly, in the hope that if the prison realm reacts to Charley’s memories and reshape itself, thus getting rid of their pursuer.

Finally, they find Ben and Polly at the Fish Finger Emporium, discussing the news on the TV about Adam Rickitt being arrested for shoplifting a New Zealand corner shop, which the Doctor thinks is odd as Rickitt is hardly newsworthy at the best of times.

Charley flashes the waiter and gets them all a round of free drinks and the Doctor awkwardly asks how Ben and Polly are since they parted company at Gatwick Airport, and the two humans swore that if they ever saw him again they’d break his fingers.

Just then, Lest the ice cream man pops inside for some lunch, so the Doctor cracks him over the head with a framed menu and steals the ice cream van, conveniently abandoning Charley in the process.

Kim meanwhile has been hiding from the monster in the only shelter available – inside the linen cupboard where C’Rizz was waiting for her and him to get squelchy. She quickly explains that simply staring at each other for a few seconds counts as sex for human beings, freeing them from "the tyranny of genital superiority".

C’Rizz has spent enough time with Charley to know Kim is talking bullshit, but pretends to fall for it since he doesn’t want to look like an even BIGGER tool than he already is.

"Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from
here!" Kim laughs and, as C’Rizz puts his pants back on, she deliberately steps on his hand.

Just for the hell of it.

At that moment, the ice cream van motors by and the duo narrowly avoid being run over by the Doctor as he screams, "I am NOT the Doctor! I am become... MOTORCYCLE SAINT SEBASTIAN! Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-ba-da-da!!"

C’Rizz and Kim manage to scramble aboard the ice cream van as it hurtles down the street at a hundred and forty-four miles an hour. Then, just like in Back to the Future, the van punches a burning hole in reality and leaves only scorched tire-tracks to mark it’s passing.

And C’Rizz and Kim, who are left sprawled on the road.

The ice cream van bursts into a studio set where the TARDIS and several Star Begotten props have been kept, but the Doctor is caught up in the excitement and tries to get the van to do a wheelie. All the time he screams, "Live to ride, ride to live – HEY!!"

The Doctor jumps from the van and surrenders to the rhythm of the hard rock music in the background, as the inexplicably-present C’Rizz and Kim provide backup singers and groovy dances.

"Lit like a live fuse, never settled!
Come on, child, press the pedal to the metal!
I gotta one way ticket, no turning back.
Live to ride, ride to live, hey!"

As the Doctor begins the next verse, he’s unaware that he’s being watched Lest and his superior, Argot. It seems that the prison has finally acclimatized to the Doctor super Time Lord powers, and created his perfect fantasy – to be a leather-clad rapscallion singing about driving really fast without due care and attention. Forever.

Unaware of his horrific predicament, the Doctor burst into song!

"No one leaves - they just move on!
Never forfeit your dignity!
Diesel heart? Pure air in your lungs!
Live to ride, ride to live - HEY!"


Part Four – Santa Monica Boulevard

Back at the Fish Finger Emporium, Ben and Polly finally collapse from exhaustion as Charley easily shags them into submission with another massive orgy, also including all the shop staff and a few customers and a bloke who just stopped by for directions.

Kim and C’Rizz stumble inside and realize the fish and chip shop now resembles an Ormellian Brothel, and the reality of the suburban prison is struggling to focus its attention on Charley. But no matter how many people it creates to sleep with her, she’s STILL horny.

"It’s what makes her so damn endearing," C’Rizz admits, before folding his arms and challenging Kim to explain how the orgy before them meets up with her descriptions of "non-tactile intercourse"?

As Charley wishes to do it in the jungles of India, or on the Great Wall of China, or rolling down the pyramids in Egypt. She’s so excited she simply can’t keep her hands to herself and C’Rizz and Kim are dragged into the next round of hardcore guilt-free sex inferno!

Elsewhere, the Doctor continues his rock song...

"Engine's blown! The gasket's shot,
Mercy, mercy, to a grinding halt!
Stench of petrol? Brand new martyrs!
Live to ride, ride to live – HEY!"

Back in the brothel, the exhausted and terrified C’Rizz and Kim weakly crawl for the exit, only for Charley to effortlessly drag them behind the counter for more naughty fun.

Meanwhile, the Doctor bursts into song once again...

"Broken down! Ditch water brown!
Pure radiance in another dead city!
I heard a voice alluring and cool say,
'Live to ride, ride to live - HEY!'"

Suddenly, the sound and music cut out, leaving the Doctor lip-synching to absolute silence, on his own, in the dark. Rather pathetic, all told, when you think about it.

At then, Argot and Lest arrive, waving their tentacles and screaming shrilly with their top three mouths.

Argot and Lest explain in a very contrived info dump that the aliens on this planet managed to extend their life spans, conquer disease and death, but this caused a huge population explosion until the planet started to fall apart from the sheer mass of all the aliens.

Finally, they discovered a mysterious magical device called the MacGuffin, which allowed them to place each individual in their own private reality cell, allowing them to exist forever in their own dreams and fantasies forever and ever.

When Tom Braudy, an astronaut shot through a wormhole and left in a living ship full of strange alien beings, struggling to get home, arrived on the planet, a cell immediately formed around him. When Kim turned out, she was chucked into the cell as well.

But the cell cannot cope with the strain of holding the Doctor, Tom, Kim, C’Rizz AND Charley – especially as it is taking more and more energy to shape itself around Charley’s varied and intense desires. Now, it cannot provide the endless orgies AND the rock music video for the Doctor, and soon all the other cells on the planet will shut down as Charley takes more and more energy.

Already the walls are starting to wobble and bend as the processors are unable to sate Charley’s karma-sutra-rewriting demands!

As the Ormellian Brothel starts to melt, C’Rizz and Kim finally scramble for rescue and Polly berates Charley for letting her libido destroy virtual reality – AGAIN!

Charley shrugs and offers to try and screw her and Ben in the real world next time, before her used sex slaves melt out of existence, leaving her, C’Rizz and Kim standing stark naked in a soiled holodeck.

The Doctor arrives with Tom Braudy on a leash and tells off Charley for letting her sex drive bring yet ANOTHER civilization to the brink of collapse! This makes it the eleventh planet they’ve been banned from because of her since they left the Divergent Universe!

Using a copy of "Tender is the Night" by F Scott Fitzgerald, the Doctor beats Argot unconscious and bundles the still half-dressed Charley and C’Rizz into the TARDIS, telling them that they’re lucky the aliens are so clueless they haven’t called the Galactic Police.

As the TARDIS dematerializes, the entire unnamed alien planet is scorched lifeless in the crossfire of a Dustbin war fleet and a battalion of Phaidon Warpsmiths and the Moaning Host.

"Phew, that was close!" say the TARDIS crew in unison, and all mime wiping their foreheads in relief. God, it’s camp.

C’Rizz points out that the Temporal Difference of Opinion is getting more hardcore in times past, present and future.

"We’ll be all right," says Charley as she idly hoses herself down. "We can just put a few hundred light years between us and them and we’ll be laughing. I mean, the battle zone is only a quarter of the universe. Maybe even less!"

"It’s only a few hours until it’s a eighth of the universe," the Doctor grumbles. "And a few months before now, it was a fifth. And tomorrow after yesterday it was..."

"We get the point," grumbles C’Rizz as he takes a turn with the hose.

"You’ll get it through your shoulder blades if there’s any justice," the Doctor grumbles. "It won’t be long before the whole of creation is caught between two battle fleets, millions of ships, fighting in the heart of mythology itself. We’re taking George Lucas on napalm here, people! But I know where we can hide until it’s all over!"

"Don’t spoil the atmosphere," Charley grunts.

"Cardiff?" asks C’Rizz, bored.

"Better EVEN than that!" the Doctor grins, setting coordinates. "I first got the idea after I was beaten up in an alleyway and then fell down a drain into a brutal psychedelic underworld. Outside time and space, the void between dimensions, out-sitting eternity itself!"

"So... THAT’S where we’re going?" asks Charley, confused.

"What? Get real, Charley! No, we’re going to--"

Due to an editing flaw, the theme tune crashes in at this point, leaving us on tenterhooks until the next story... only a mere fourteen months later. Dunno about you but I’M excited!

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