Audio Review: The Nightmare Fair

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Doctor Who: The Nightmare Fair by Graham Williams


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I found this a bit of a mixed bag. On the plus side: David Bailie gives a really stellar performance as the Celestial Toymaker. Really, if they ever bring that character back on TV, I hope they get Bailie to do it. The rest of the cast does a good job as well, with Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant shifting their characterizations back towards where they were in the mid-80s without becoming too grating. And the idea of bringing the Toymaker into the realm of video arcades and fun-fairs is just one that's so obvious that it should have been done decades ago.

On the minus side: The story just feels a bit thin. For a story about the Celestial Toymaker, you'd expect a really climactic game-playing sequence, but most of episode 2 is taken up by our heroes sitting locked in a cell building a strange gizmo for purposes that are only revealed at the end. It might have worked better visually than on audio - John Ainsworth has done a great job adapting this to audio, but it's very hard to make the sequence where the Doctor has to play the Toymaker's video game suspenseful using just sound. Nor did the monsters unleashed by the Toymaker's game seem like a particularly compelling threat.

In general, I get the feeling that if this had been made as part of Season 23 as originally planned, it would now be remembered as a good, fun, but unspectacular piece of Doctor Who. It's certainly a good, fun, but unspectacular Doctor Who audio. It's worth a listen just for Bailie's performance and a glimpse at Season 23 as it could have been, but I do find myself hoping that some of the forthcoming Lost Stories have a bit more spark to them.

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