Other Lives (audio story)

Other Lives
Doctor:	Eighth Doctor
Companion(s):	Charley, C'rizz
Main enemy:	Jacob Crackles
Main setting:	London, 1851
Key crew
Publisher:	Big Finish Productions
Writer:	Gary Hopkins
Director:	Gary Russell
Music:	David Darlington
Post production:	David Darlington
Cover by:	Lee Binding
Release details
Release number:	77
Release date:	December 2005
Format:	4 Episodes on 2 CDs
Production code:	8Y
ISBN:	ISBN 1-84435-162-9
Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories
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Other Lives was the seventy-seventh monthly Doctor Who audio story produced by Big Finish Productions.

Publisher's summary

London, 1851.

Scene of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.

Scene also of a plot to unseat the government, dethrone the monarch and start a republic.

If the Duke of Wellington himself is to be believed...

While the Doctor and Charley are drawn into the murky world of nineteenth-century politics, C'rizz struggles to maintain his dignity against growing odds.

What begins as an attempt to prevent murder quickly becomes a desperate race to avert revolution. Separated from the TARDIS, the travellers are left to wonder if they'll get their own lives back or be forever entangled with the lives of others.

And who is Mrs Georgina Marlowe? What need does she feel the Doctor can satisfy?

Plot

The Doctor takes his companions to the great exhibition in 1851. Charley meets the Duke of Wellington; C’rizz becomes kidnapped by a local street thug and put on display as a freak; the Doctor saves a French couple from assassination by letting them into his TARDIS, but gets mistaken for their assailant when the TARDIS dematerialises all of a sudden. In prison he meets the real assassin and inadvertently helps him escape. The next morning a woman claiming to be his wife posts his bail. The woman keeps trying to convince him that he is her husband but after another incident with the assassin, he is told that she already knows. She needed his likeness to fool her husband’s uncle so that she and her children will be able to keep their home. The Doctor decides to play along with the charade and returns to the Crystal Palace afterwards, where he finds C’rizz and Charley and the TARDIS.

Cast

• The Doctor/Edward Marlow - Paul McGann
• Charley Pollard/Madame De Roche - India Fisher
• C'rizz/Monsieur De Roche - Conrad Westmaas
• The Duke of Wellington - Ron Moody
• Mr. Fazackerly - Michael Hobbs
• Jacob Crackles - Mike Holloway
• Maxi - Peter Howe
• Georgina Marlow - Francesca Hunt
• Rufus Dimplesqueeze - Maitland Chandler

References

• The Doctor adjusts the isomorphic controls of the TARDIS to allow C'rizz to open the doors.
• The Doctor performs several sleight-of-hand tricks in order to earn enough money to enter the Great Exhibition.
• C'rizz does not know what a greenhouse is.
• The Doctor tells Georgina Marlow that he has never thought of himself as a family man.

Notes

• To date, this is the only pure historical story in performed Doctor Who to feature the Eighth Doctor.
• This is the first of two audio dramas released in the main range to feature the Duke of Wellington as a character. The other is AUDIO: The Curse of Davros in January 2012, in which the Duke was played by Granville Saxton. He does not actually have a direct conversation with the Doctor in either story.
• Paul McGann, India Fisher and Conrad Westmaas all play dual roles in this story.
• Ron Moody was offered the role of the Third Doctor in 1969, but declined, as recounted by Jon Pertwee in multiple interviews, Elisabeth Sladen and Moody himself.
• This audio drama was recorded on 29 and 30 April 2005.

Continuity

• The Second Doctor previously met the Duke of Wellington in September 1805 and May and June 1815. (PROSE: World Game) Later in his personal timeline, the Doctor visited the Duke in 1816 and they went on a trip to Brighton, where they met the Prince Regent. (PROSE: Players) As was the case with his second incarnation, the Sixth Doctor was present at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. The same was true of Davros and the Daleks. (AUDIO: The Curse of Davros)
• The Fifth Doctor once attempted to take his companions Nyssa and Tegan Jovanka to the Great Exhibition as "a treat" in the wake of Adric's death but the TARDIS instead materialised on the tarmac at Heathrow Airport in 1982. (TV: Time-Flight)
• The Doctor once again observes that "sleep is for tortoises." (TV: The Talons of Weng-Chiang)
• Charley previously visited the Crystal Palace as a child in the 1910s or 1920s. (AUDIO: The Next Life)
• C'rizz is forced to perform in Jacob Crackles' freakshow in the same manner as the alien creatures in Thaddeus P. Winklemeyer's freakshow were in Buzzard Creek, Arizona in 1905. (AUDIO: Freakshow)
• During his eleventh incarnation, the Doctor would later return to the Great Exhibition in the company of Amy Pond and Rory Williams and encounter the Hypothetical Gentleman. On that occasion, he mentioned that he had to be careful not to run into himself. (COMIC: Hypothetical Gentleman)
• The Doctor and his companions agree to meet at Oslers Crystal Fountain. The Seventh Doctor previously dealt with an incident involving the fountain. (COMIC: Claws of the Klathi)

External links

• Official Other Lives page at bigfinish.com
• Other Lives at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• DisContinuity for Other Lives at Tetrapyriarbus - The DisContinuity Guide