Monday, November 2, 2009

7th Doctor - The Magic Mousetrap

Serial 7W/J - The Magic Mushroom
An Extract From The EC Unauthorized Guide O' Sex Games Without Frontiers

D O C T O R W H O

Serial 7W/J - The Magic Mushroom


Part One

The Doctor is immensely pissed off when the TARDIS console starts marking strange and naughty-sounded noises, as if the time machine has suddenly come under the control of someone or something that knows EXACTLY which "buttons to press", if you get my drift.

Hex is very impressed when the TARDIS lands in what seems to be a complete white void (one of his favorite place to pull a few cones and marvel at the amazingness of the universe), and though Ace puts a dent in his enthusiasm by pointing out they’re just in a really big room PAINTED white, Hex decides "it'll do" and starts looking for his stash.

The Doctor agrees with Hex that this is triumph of strict attention to minimalist detail, noting the lack of colour, doors, windows or imagination and suggests that Hex's stoner approach might be the best one to take until Ace notes that the TARDIS has vanished.

Hex is horrified – whatever has taken the space time machine has also taken his vast private collection of dangerous pharmaceuticals! The Doctor and Ace wisely hide in the corner as, gripped by a ferocious detox anger, Hex tries to smash his way out of the white void. Thankfully, a portrait appears on a wall and tells the former ambulance driver to calm the hell down for five minutes. Oddly enough, a talking painting causes Hex to freak out even more than before.

Hex charges the picture, screaming that he will not let the Devil get his brain until the end of the financial year, and succeeds in breaking through the wall...

...into another white walled room. But, luckily, this room has a door so the Doctor and Ace lead the way out. The Time Lord gives Hex a pineapple to stroke and pet and love to keep him calm until they find their way back to the TARDIS.

The trio find themselves in a room with some surprisingly convincing Jurassic Park jungle wallpaper, giving the impression of being in a dinosaur-infected tropical island. In the room are four Bratz Dolls who are preparing to race through the jungle to get a mysterious crystalline sex toy and back to the starting line.

For no obvious reason bar perhaps narratorial convenience, the trio decide to join in – after all, a crystal dildo is never good news, is it? Just ask Jon Pertwee. Being a cunning bastard, the Doctor lets the Braztz Dolls fight amongst themselves until there is only one survivor with the curiously-shaped crystal, and then has Ace mug her, thus winning the competition square if not fair.

Dragging the giggling Hex after them, the Doctor and Ace move into yet ANOTHER white room covered with condoms and contraceptives of all shapes and sizes. The clear challenge is to find one that isn’t defective, though the TARDIS crew are nauseated at the obvious way of finding out. Hex announces he has never known in his entire life a two-pound black-ripped knobbler to have caused either disease or babies, and to the mild surprise of the Doctor and Ace, is proved absolutely right. Instantly a door opens and they move into the next room.

The conventional, dank, dungeon-like décor shocks the trio, mainly because they were expecting another white room. But here the challenge is to get through the dungeon without being seen by the mud-wrestling ninja babe assassins of death who are standing around the place, bored and having a crafty fag.

The Doctor, Ace and Hex consider several courses of action. Should they split up? Stick together? It then strikes Ace she hasn’t blown up anything in simply AGES so a few cans of Nitro-9 are used to blow up all the assassins and the trio easily walk through the charcoal-like corpses and burning furniture to the next challenge. In, get this, ANOTHER white room.

Ace decides to cut the crap and just use Nitro-9 on all their adversaries, from the kinky Dungeon and Dragons version of Baby Oil Twister; blowing a straight path through a labyrinthine maze haunted by weird robots and evil smoke monsters and supernatural Star Trek technobbable and proto-Cybermen and a spiky-haired Scotsman in a pinstripe suit; a laser-tag game using orgasmatronic lasers on highly-experienced French tarts; a disturbing life-sized game of Rather Phallic Snakes and Vibrating Leather Ladders....

Finally they find the TARDIS and confront the homicidal 1960s-Batman-series-esque nutter behind all this Avengers-esque shite: a happy-looking Frenchman in tight red leather pants.

This is the Sexual Toymaker, a Hartnell-era villain people keep bringing back in the delusion he wasn’t complete and utter crap in the first place. Still, the powers of Ian Levine propaganda and fandom nostalgia will not be denied.

The Toymaker challenges the Doctor to one final game, a pornographic word association game where one player describes a perverted sexual practice and the other must come up with something even more disturbing. The Doctor gets Ace and Hex to flee into the TARDIS, knowing they would never be able to look at him again if they heard the kind of kinky shit he was about to describe.

The Toymaker begins with "fisting", and whatever the Doctor says in response is so disgusting the elemental immortal rushes out of the room to vomit copiously into a bucket. The Doctor has won hands down... though he DOES feel morally obliged to wash his mouth out.

In fact, the Toymaker is so revolted that he is transformed into an inflatable sex doll – a horrible fate he always dishes out to drifters he forced to play his naughty games. All the Toymaker’s previous victims are brought back to life, feeling very embarrassed and dirty; the BAD kind of dirty. Hearing what the Doctor said, this Lovecraftian sexual activity, has corrupted them all.

The Doctor realizes that this hard-core filth is lodged inside the minds of everyone except Ace and Hex who were sensibly hiding in the TARDIS (the latter getting a few medicinal cones and now believing he is a French gerbil called Angus). The Time Lord thus decides they must all erase their memories and start new lives, one last kinky role-playing game to end ALL kinky role-playing games!

Ace points out that this kind of Men In Black bollocks will be time-consuming, complicated and boring listening, so the Doctor picks up the inflatable doll the Toymaker has turned into and decides to use his powers to shift them all out of the Sexual Toyroom and back into reality, dues-ex-machinerizing all the fiddly stuff in the way.

"No need to worry, Ace," the Doctor assures her, "the Toymaker’s a hyper-dimensional being that requires a whole sliver of reality to himself. Take him outside his domain and he’s dead meat. Well, apart from that one time in Blackpool. But we don’t mention that."

Ace points out that even so, taking a spirit of mischief from the Old Times with them is just begging for disaster to unfold.

"Oh, lighten up, Ace! It’s not as if this is the FIRST time we’ve put the entire universe in mortal peril by pissing about with Elder Gods, is it?" the Doctor scolds. "Right! Next stop: Switzerland!"


Part Two

The Doctor, Ace, Hex and the others appear on a Swiss mountainside in 1926. With the unwilling help of the Inflatable Toymaker, the elderly ex-toys of Ludo, Snap, Kerplunk and Hungry Hungry Hippo set up the Hullabaloo Clinic – an excusive sanatorium where they can all recover from the revolting events of the previous episode and play strip poker and naked musical chairs to while away the hours.

To aide with things, the guests all assume new identities – Ludo is now a sexually-abnormal mad scientist and Deputy Gynaecological Medical Director following the sad loss of his anal virginity; Snap is the one who took aforementioned anal virginity; Kerplunk is a one-eyed chartered prostitute who lost her voice since a smiling accident in a rowing boat on Lake Beeblebrox in the summer of 1919; and Hungry Hungry Hippo is a failed drag-act with pretensions of being Quentin Crisp.

But even this isn’t enough to take their minds off the horrible things they heard the Doctor say, and Hex is the one who comes up with the answer, surprisingly. Less surprisingly is the fact his solution involves them all eating huge amounts of magic mushrooms and going on a one-way voyage to Trip Out City!

Having exhausted all the other logical options (not to mention the listener’s patience), the Doctor agrees and everyone is soon so off their face they have completely forgotten what the fuck is going on and giggling uncontrollably. Alas, their memories soon start to return and more and more freaky fungi needs to be consumed – a vicious cycle that goes on for day after day until they are finally unable to remember what they’re trying to forget and decide to consume the mushrooms just to "be on the safe side". Or "to take the edge off" in Hex’s case.

Several action montages later, the amnesiac Doctor is left gibbering in a cable car where he meets a strange transsexual called Queenie Glass-Cock who claims to be Snap’s live-in lover. As they return to the sanatorium, the duo suffer erotic electrical shocks from the electrified door handles. This kinky torture unsurprisingly clears the Doctor’s mind, so Ludo and Twister immediately beat him up and try to force more mushrooms down his throat.

However, the Doctor finally finds his sonic screwdriver, which he hasn’t bothered to use since he finally rebuilt it to open a particularly stubborn pickle jar during Ace’s "McShane" period. He immediately then sets it to "garlic fry" and completely ruins the sanatorium’s entire supply of mind-altering fungus.

"What are you complaining about?" the Doctor shouts angrily. "They taste much better cooked!"

Ludo rants that the Doctor has destroyed their one hope of survival, but the Doctor – having that amnesia shebang – assumes Ludo is simply a junkie loser and has no idea what he’s talking about. The Time Lord runs off to cause more chaos and stumbles across the isolation ward. The idea of contagious patients sounds like something to liven up his day and he rushes inside to find Ace and Hex...

...who are now SO off their faces they believe they are two upper-class twits called the Honorable Bunty and Bobo Stetterton! They’ve completely forgotten who the Doctor is and, assuming he’s some kind of gossip columnist stalking them, chloroform him unconscious.

"Jolly good show there, eh, what?" Hex giggles at a clockwork robot only he can see.


Part Three

The Doctor regains consciousness the next day, in the middle of Queenie having rough sex with him while he was out. As she recovers from the fourteenth consecutive multiple orgasm, Queenie notes there seem to be rats in the walls and this reminds her of an old Nigel Kneale TV show that won’t be made for another 50 years.

However, this violent shagging has cleared the Doctor’s mind even more than his previous electrocution – he feels stronger, and now has a strong suspicion he is a deeply perverted bastard if drugs, electrocution and comedy rape can restore his faculties!

Ludo arrives and is furious that the Doctor is introducing his wanton lusts into the world and thus forces him and Queenie to jog around the mountain nude until their rude bits are shriveled enough to defeat the Time Lord’s galactic libido. Whether this is for fear such kinkiness will reactivate the Toymaker or maybe Ludo is just a weird prude is left to the listener to decide, assuming there still are any.

Accompanying the Doctor and Queenie on their sex-drive-destroying nude jog across the Swiss mountainside are Kerplunk and a new guest called Uno, an Amsterdam brothel magnate with a permanent colostomy bag that ruined her cabaret singing career by squelching disgustingly on the high notes.

The Doctor decides that he is completely sick of this crap and decides to jog towards civilization with Queenie to, er, "keep him warm". However, it transpires this nude obstacle course is part of a huge board game and the Doctor’s rebelliousness not only leads him to miss a turn, but also cause an avalanche! Snow on the mountain above breaks free and an avalanche races towards the Doctor and Queenie, threatening to cool their passions FOREVER!

Thinking quickly, the pair drop-kick Ludo and use his unconscious body as a makeshift snow-board down the mountain, destroys the cable car, smashes through the French windows of the sanatorium and comes to a halt of Snap and Hungry Hungry Hippo in a customized ballroom that is now set up for a giant game of Baby Oil Twister – the most disgustingly erotic and lubricant-requiring pastime known to human kind!

Plus, it’s also electrified, which is twice as nasty since the oiled players are much more conductive than normal.

There are more ominous scratchings behind the walls, as if something is trying to break free through the plaster, and is following them from room to room. Snap is confident that is all some rather stupid LSD flashback and they should all enjoy a nice game of bondage.

The Doctor gleefully agrees... until he finds out the game involves strapping him to a couch and then pumping him full of enough morphine to send a rhinoceros into hibernation – while Queenie is loaded into a clay-pigeon catapult and sent hurtling off into the night sky.

Just then the thing behind the walls breaks free – though still trapped in the form of a deluxe model inflatable sex partner, the Sexual Toymaker is free!

However, no one has any idea who the hell he is, so the moment is rather undermined. Instead, everyone decides to have an eisteddfod – the traditional Welsh talent show designed to bore the audience stiff – to keep their minds occupied and prevent them from doing anything naughty with the succulent sex toy...

Suddenly, Queenie returns with a Molotov cocktail and screams she intends to "light the flames of passion" – and if she burns down the sky and kills everyone, she doesn’t give a damn. Sexual frustration can do that to you. Er, I understand.

The distraction allows the Toymaker to regain the power of speech and mock the others that if they’d kept their vile lusts under control for a few more hours he would have died out completely, but now he’s back to sadistically manipulate the lives of mortals and chew bubblegum.

And he just ran out of bubblegum!


Part Four

Ludo reacts to this calmly by charging the Toymaker with an axe screaming "ALL PLAY AND NO WORK MAKES LUDO GO EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY PSYCHOPATHIC!!" over and over again.

But, being a god-like super-being, the Toymaker reduces Ludo to the crude boardgame he’s named after. God-like super-beings are weird like that, aren’t they?

The Sexual Toymaker reveals he cunningly tricked them all from the very beginning – they never left the Sexual Toyroom, he just redecorated it to disguise his domain as 1920s Switzerland on the off-chance this would ever happen! In fact, he didn’t lose at all, he just pretended to in order to enjoy some humiliation for a change!

Though no one buys this "I MEANT to do that!" bullshit, the Toymaker orders everyone to play against each other in sex games of his choosing and when they have just one triumphant player remaining, he’ll "give them what they want". If you get my drift.

Kerplunk is forced to take part in a recreation of The Einstein Factor, with the Toymaker as Peter Berner and Caligula, Rasputin and Jack the Ripper as the Brain’s Trust. Kerplunk’s specialist subject will be "Reasons Why We’re Going To Violate You To Death".

As poor Kerplunk can’t speak to answer the question, she unsurprisingly loses and suffers 2500 volts before the Brain’s Trust molest her into oblivion and the Toymaker arbitrarily declares Uno the winner of the first round as she wasn’t stupid enough to play the game in the first place.

The Toymaker begins the next game – Porn-Star Midgets Punch My Wife! – and again Uno is sensible enough not to take part, so it’s Hungry Hungry Hippo who is forced to put on a dress and be beaten up by midgets in S&M leather outfits until he too loses.

The next game must be 'Nude Baked Bean Wrestling Mortal Combat' involving Queenie and Uno. Uno recklessly agrees to participate, believing it to be a double bluff, and is dead in two minutes with Heinz’ finest in her lungs.

In the meantime, the Doctor announces that Queenie’s idea to set fire to everything is a damn good plan and puts it into action. While the Toymaker forces Snap and Queenie to a round of electrified Baby Oil Twister and are so absorbed in the game, they don’t notice the Doctor, Ace and Hex buggering off in the TARDIS while the Sexual Toyroom burns to the non-ground.

The Doctor is confident it will be two thousand billion years before the Toymaker is able to get in their way again.

"Mind you, that IS what I said last time," the Doctor shrugs.


Book(s)/Other Related –
Dr. Who & The Sexual Toymaker Get It On
Doctor Who Has A Holiday At The Taxpayer’s Expense
The "Most Revolting Sex Act In The World" sketch from Monty Python, where the Nazis are defeated by Allied Forces talking naughty in German


Fluffs - Sylvester McCoy seemed a fun guy in this story.

"Being succinct, this is the Sexual Toymaker who delights in playing all manner of inflatable playthings, and anyone who pits their macabre kinky games against him ends up submitting and being one of his genitals for all eternity! His reputation rather precedes him, which is why he’s hiding in the non-shadows, fiddling with himself... Hang on, I didn’t get that right, did I? No, he PLAYS kinky games, people PIT their genitals against him and BECOME inflatable dolls. But he’s still fiddling with himself over in that corner."


Goofs -
Matthew "Stark Raving Bonkers" Sweet was actually rehired by Big Finish after "The Year of the Lame Dog" (Serial 6Y/A).


Fashion Victims -
The Doctor’s question-mark-patterned pajamas were bad enough. But matching condoms?! What the fuck?!


Technobabble -
The Toymaker thrives on "psychosynthetic stimulated friction". Eww.


Links and References -
The Doctor initially assumes that the vicious extra-dimensional bored god tormenting them is actually Cockylickin from "The Recast", before Ace points out he makes that assumption every time he confronts a supervillain and has been wrong each and every occasion.


Untelevised Misadventures -
The Doctor was deeply taken aback to find the vicious Quirk Imperator in Nuremberg 1906 was not, actually, Cockylickin from "The Recast" wearing a strange hat.


Groovy DVD Extras -
Complimentary hallucinogenic mushrooms. Trust me, a lot better than trying to listen to this sober...


Dialogue Disasters -

Doctor: You’re the Celestial Toymaker!
Hex: Like, what does that mean?
Doctor: It means bad. Very, very bad. We’re in over our heads!
(Hex lights up a joint.)
Hex: Chillax, dude. Have a bang on this.


Ludo: I’ve been trapped in your domain for ten years playing electric shock tiddlywinks and aphrodisiac-tipped pin the tail on the donkey! WELL NO MORE! I have got a HEADACHE!!!!


Doctor: Why did you give up your powers?
Toymaker: I wanted to feel what it was like to lose, to suffer humiliation and debasement. Just for a little while.
Doctor: And how does it feel?
Toymaker: Tickles a bit.


Dialogue Triumphs -

Doctor: Running away from something? I can understand that. Do it all
the time: commitment, responsibility, alimony payments... Running towards something? That has its appeals, too. But running round in circles? I feel like a rat in a maze, Queenie. Every time I come within
sniffing distance of a bit of cheese, someone clobbers me!
Queenie: Or electrifies you.
Doctor: Or whacks a shot of morphine into my bloodstream.
Queenie: Marvellous, isn’t it?
Doctor: I know! I haven’t felt this good in years!


Hex: I hate this. Lying to him. Manipulating him.
Ace: Yeah? Well he’s done it enough to us, hasn’t he? Putting us
through the mangler, setting us up. Don’t start feeling sorry for him, Hex, it doesn’t help.
Hex: You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?
Ace: Hell yeah. Aren’t you?
Hex: Kinda, but, dudette, it’s such hard work!
Ace: You got that right. Pass me another mushroom, old bean.
Hex: Tally-ho!


Doctor: You think my life is dull? How very dare you! The only dullard around here is you, Toymaker. Yours is the tiresome life, a life that never changes, playing the same naughty games knowing you’re bound to climax first!
Toymaker: But there is a certainty in my life - I do not have to fear the unknown, or concern myself with the sexual abnormalities of lesser species. My bedroom antics are all that I need.
Doctor: Except that you interact with those same lesser species in order to have your orgies! All of this extravagance makes me think you’re trying to compensate for something!
Toymaker: I have nothing to compensate for.
Doctor: How about your commitment issues? The greatest fear of anyone is to be alone. And if you didn’t have your toys, or people to play your games, then you would be very much alone. The Single Bachelor Toymaker!
Toymaker: Do you presume to judge me, Doctor?!
Doctor: I simply speak as I find. Loser.


UnQuotable Quote -

Doctor: I may be kinky, but the Toymaker is fucking depraved!


Viewer Quotes -

"Wow! That Magic Mushroom was a weird and wonderful experience! The story wasn’t too bad either... I really, really enjoyed it. It almost cured by thirteenth clinical depression. In fact, I think I’m developing a craving... Oh it’s so fucking beautiful, man!"
- Neil Pye (2010)

"The use of Ace and Hex was refreshingly different. More companions should spend the entire adventure ripped off their tits on freaky fungi. Everybody MUST get stoned!" - Frank Gallagher (2009)

"It’s layered, clever, and makes me want to go into the cellar and blow my brains out with a shotgun. Hugely engaging!"
- Paris Hilton (2010)

"Very creepy, very disturbing, very neat and very, very listenable. In
fact, on first listen, my only complain is that I haven’t a clue what
the Doctor’s gruesome sex act is... I just cant make it out with the vomiting... Bah!" - totallymissedthepoint.com reviews (2009)

"I cannot FUCKING BELIEVE that they preferred to cast some unknown as the Sexual Toymaker, JUST because he’s Julia Sawahla’s dad! Why not me? I could bring the character back with twice as much splendor, three times as much sexual magnetism and four times as close to the original heritage. Stories about omnipotent sex offenders would rekindle my passion for Big Finish and make me hunger for more. Bastards. I think I’ll go back to Cardiff where they truly appreciate my genius!"
- Nigel Verkoff (2009)

"I found the whole saga a bit stodgy, a bit like kicking off a meal with a huge portion of your favourite pudding that you haven’t had for years, only to find it vaguely disappointing. But, in general, magic mushrooms are the perfect starter: cleverly put together to produce a delicate taste that doesn’t overpower but leaves your mouth watering... Roll on the next course: lemon sorbet!" - The Unpublished Target Novel "Doctor Who and the Cooking Analogies"

"I sort of guessed the main enemy, since he was on the cover."
- Pauline Vole (2009)

"This play must be one of the best for a long time. It was completely bonkers and refreshingly original. I didn’t understand a bloody work of it and as such will be one that will probably benefit from re-listenings, thus giving me my money’s worth. My, how fabulously cost-efficient this all is!"
- a Chartered Accountant of the Global Financial Crisis Era (2011)

Psychotic Nostalgia -
"Matthew Sweet has written a fantastic and well thought out play, I loved it and it didn’t destroy my sanity in any way, shape or form. At all. 100% raw, undiluted genius. Hee-hee-hee."


Sylvester McCoy Speaks!
"I’ve heard a lot about The Sexual Toymaker, which is one of those Hartnell stories people have spoken about with awe... before locking themselves in the bathroom for long periods of time. This very mysterious gigolo, one of those a classic Doctor Who thing of turning kinky sex and turning them into something evil and dangerous. I think the writing of Doctor Who is sometimes at its best when they take something most swingers are comfortable with and made it... lethal. Like The Greatest Blow In The Galaxy... Ah. You know, they say I’m an old hand at amnesia, and I’ll take their word for it as I don’t remember. True, I have been hit on the head a few times and woken up groggy many times, but my private life doesn’t often link up with professional acting, so this makes a nice change."


Sophie Aldred Speaks!
"When it comes to games, I’m beaten on a regular basis. It’s a perk."


Philip Olivier Speaks!
"My how the tables have turned as Hex’s dependency on hallucinogenic fungus saves the day instead of endangering it in the first place. I like positive reinforcement like that, don’t you? Peace out."


Trivia -
It took an incredible SEVEN ENTIRE MINUTES between this story being commissioned and the public guessing the identity the secret returning villain, around thirteen seconds longer than it took for the viewers to twig who Sir Derek Jacobi really was in 2007’s "Dystopia".


Rumors & Facts -

A surreal, innocent-yet-sinister tale of grotesque characters carrying out macabre manipulations is a true characteristic of the McCoy era, with stories like The Greatest Blow in the Galaxy, Bertie Bassett Takes Shit From No-One, and of course Goth Night. To put it another way, the McCoy era is incredibly pompous formulaic crap and Doctor Who fans are very easy impressed.

After all, The Magic Mushroom is just the kind of clever, witty script that fans bitchily hold up as proving Doctor Who is different from boring old science-fiction; anything that can make the fanbase feel all superior to Trekkies and their ilk and that those losers like to tell themselves is the rule rather than the exception.

Me? I stopped being a Who fan years ago! I’m just a Robin Hood 2005 fan in deep cover. Now stop pestering me, you bitches.

Now, Nicholas Briggs (AKA Briggos the Destroyer) had been missing since 2008 where RTD crushed his pathetic dreams in front of 17 million TV viewers. This was a good thing, and Big Finish was becoming slightly less pathetic now it was no longer being run by a self-destructive psychopath with a strange fetish for toothbrushes.

Left alone to their own devices, Big Finish was starting to get its act together for the first time since... well, for the first time. One cunning idea was, rather than rope in actors on alternate months to do different Doctor stories, they could simply record three stories in one go and leave Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy in relative peace eight months of the year. They were delighted at this suggestion, especially when the police confirmed that Briggs was missing presumed dead and thoroughly unlikely to turn up during recording.

So, for the McCoy three-story mini-series it was decided to have a typically theatrical larger-than-life story, then a hardcore emo-angst-wank fest of borderline NA quality, and then a story with Richard Griffiths going apeshit in a continuity that never was – mainly because to do anything else would have required an amount of effort and original thought that the production team were simply unwilling to provide. Life’s a bitch, huh?

It was director Ken Bentley – part-time cannibal impersonator for children’s parties – who came up with the incredibly stupid idea of bringing back Matthew Sweet to write for Big Finish. Known as "Insane Captain of a Tanker Full of Lovecraftian Nightmare Fuel" by social services, Sweet was a historian, journalist, broadcaster and more dangerous than a barrel full of rabies-infected monkeys.

After his previous sanity-destroying Sixth Doctor, Peri and Sil story The Year of the Lame Dog drove most cast and crew to believe they were actually Belgian earwigs on cocaine, it would have been a sensible decision to avoid even mentioning Sweet ever again. Rehiring him was preferable only to using black magic to summon a clone of Nick Briggs... then again, maybe that WAS on the cards. How do I know? It’s not like I’m an expert on this or anything! I HATE YOU ALL!

Ahem.

Since TYOTLD, Sweet had been sent to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Ostensibly this was to soak up the literary atmosphere that so inspired Thomas Mann to write The Magic Mountain in the previous century... but was actually to lock the bastard up and throw away the key. Alas, within 24 hours the entire sanatorium had been closed down and Sweet was loose in the world of mortal men once more.

Sweet was determined to come up with a science fiction story that didn’t use the expression "initiate" every other line. This wouldn’t seem to have been a very difficult thing to do, but Sweet needed to be so outlandish it would drive listeners to suicide to escape the "fruity" cabaret style – indeed, this is reflected in the finished story where the Doctor describes something so unspeakably vulgar that even the Crystal Guardian of 5-Dimenional Fellatio needs to leave the room for some fresh air.

In order to try and numb the total-sensory-carnage, it was decided to bring back the character of the Sexual Toymaker – a 1960s super-villain that possessed the amazing ability to stop people realizing what utter crap he was. The Toymaker had returned in books, comic strips and audio – but then again, so have the freaking Zarbi! – but hit the big time by actually returning in 1986 to face the Sixth Doctor on television in The Care-Bear Nightmare Fair. Tragically a rather ill-thought conspiracy meant The Care-Bear Nightmare Fair was hidden from the public until 2005, and so the titular Toymaker was back in vogue. AGAIN! Big Finish had been making increasingly half-assed attempts to do a story about this public domain god-like alien ever since.

Interestingly, this would not be the first time that the Seventh Doctor had encountered the happy Frenchman in his tight leather pants. It’s a little known fact that, in 1993, a Children in Need special entitled "The Sex Game" was produced in the vague hope it would raise charity funds and more importantly shut up the fan base.

Produced by David Roden and a well-down-the-road-of-madness John Satan-Turner, this special featured the Fourth through Seventh Doctors, the Brigadier, UNIT and of course the Sexual Toymaker who has got up to some naughtiness that only YOU can stop via tax deductible donations to that stupid bear with the eyepatch.

The 13 minute 6 second adventure begins with the Seventh Doctor in the TARDIS, forced to watch in disgust as the Toymaker captures his past selves and prepares to recreate the sodomy scenes from "Pulp Fiction". The Seventh Doctor does a deal with the godlike alien, challenging him to a last bit of naughty role-playing game where the brave renegade Time Lord must fight the immortal Star-Trek-grade super-alien to regain control of the TARDIS and save the universe – with the Toymaker not realize the Doctor isn’t pretending at all!

Showing truly god-like naïveté, the Toymaker actually agrees to this "battle of willies in a world of erotic imaginings" – which happens to take the form of the Brigadier, Yates and Benton being teleported into a deserted fairground at the middle of the night, facing exploding clowns who try to molest the team. This is followed by a bunch of sex-starved Cybermen lurching out of a nearby lake, seeking flesh to get jiggy with, only for their highly-aroused iron wills to act as lightning conductors and blow the tin fuckers up.

The boys from UNIT flee into the haunted house, facing harmless fake ghosts miming pages of the Karma Sutra, and a Cyberman that has finally gone blind from all the vice on display – which is accidentally wiped out by a cheese sandwich Benton was trying to eat. The Brigadier announces he is "sick of these motherfucking aliens on this motherfucking dreamscape" and pops a cap in the Toymaker’s ass, symbolically sending the chivalrous pervert into a Black Hole.

Amazingly this skit didn’t do much for charity OR for Doctor Who, and is generally ignored by fandom who much prefer the sequel "Destination: Get-Out Clause" where the Seventh Doctor and the Brigadier are killed by a passing squad of Cybermen. Viewers were invited to ring up Children in Need on whether they wanted our heroes to survive and defeat the Cybermen, but no one did. Bummer, huh?

Anyway, no one remembers The Sex Game, not even Sylvester McCoy. If I hadn’t illegally downloaded the damn thing off some shitty freeshare website, I myself would doubt it existed. BTW, don’t ask for a copy. It’s crap. And I ain’t talking about picture quality.

In any case, Sweet’s Toymaker tale was already scaring people who hadn’t even heard about it, and BBC Wales themselves stepped in to abort the story. When Sweet stared at them with his cold, dead eyes, eyes windows on an abyss of insanity, and then had the audacity to ask them "Why?", the BBC were stumped.

Hastily, they claimed that they were doing a story that involved the historical mystery of Agatha Christie’s ten-day disappointment and if Big Finish attempted to do the same, canon would be torn apart. Because a show with three different destructions of Atlantis is REALLY focused on piddly continuity detail... oh wait, it is, oddly enough.

Alas, Agatha Christie wasn’t actually in Sweet’s story in the first place – and the BBC were forced to actually make a story about her to justify their intrusion into Big Finish. The Magic Mushroom (as The Sexual Toymaker Goes Off His Face On Hardcore Drugs was carefully renamed) was made, people bought it, listened to it, went mad, got over it, the usual sort of stuff happened. How many of these bloody guides have I done now? Can’t you see the patterns emerging yet?

Probably the only thing left to mention is the baffling cliffhanger to episode two where Hex starts singing a tribute to the Shaman’s "Eberneezer Goode", explaining the entire plot. Rather odd that everyone ignored it, like the fact Hex was referencing a song about ecstasy in a story about exotic mushrooms...


There’s a guy in the place, he’s got a bittersweet face
And he goes by the name of Sexual Toymaker
He’s from another realm and he tends to overwhelm
Turning people to sex toys is his main raison d’être

He’s celestial when it comes to his sexual festival
He’s a swinger from the 60s way before Tom Baker
But if you know who he is, don’t take the piss
He’s ever so awesome, the Sexual Toymaker

You can see that he's mysterious, mischievous and devious
As he forces people to play his naughty games
It rarely stays fun when you’re with this criminal genius
If you’re a fictional character, real, insane or lame

No matter what the media, no matter where he goes
The Toymaker always plays by his own rules
He’s been on television and in books, comics and audios
But after forty years, there’s nobody he fools!

With an eternity of leisure, he’s only in it for the pleasure
Though he did take over Blackpool that one time
The Toymaker’s a very sore loser, user and abuser
But he’s just a lonely, bored deity! Is that really a crime?

When the Toymaker’s in town it’s smart not to be around
Nightmares, Care-Bears and such distractions abound
Arcade games end with death races for chasers
When you’re playing his games, your future’s unsound!

Heartbreaker, Risk-Taker
Sexual Toymaker!
Salt Shaker, Circuit Breaker
Sexual Toymaker!
Opium-Maker, Amish Quaker
Sexual Toymaker!
Census Taker, Image Faker
Stone Breaker, Hell’s Half Acre
Sexual Toymaker!

Wicked!

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