The One Doctor [AUDIO/2001.12.17]

★★★★★

  How to describe The One Doctor — festive, imaginative, ingenious, hilarious? It brings me great pleasure to say that it's all of those things and more besides. Few Doctor Who adventures give me the comfortable and jovial spirit that The One Doctor does, and thanks to the talent of Gary Russell as a director, this is one galaxy-spanning epic that I can't imagine being represented to its full potential in any other medium than audio. How else am I to immerse myself in the lush sound design, the incredible music by Alistair Lock, the glowing dialogue, and the sheer ambitious nature of the piece?

  Colin Baker is fantastic in any genre of Who, but he seems to shine particularly when the story plays to his comedic and entertaining strength. In The One Doctor, he's annoyed, witty to a fault, awkward when given romantic advances, and a genuine powerhouse. In other words, he's a bundle of laughs with a multi-colored coat on, and listening to him is one of the most gorgeous experiences you'll ever have. Bonnie Langford's Mel is equally smart and entertaining, and it's great that the script seems to understand the character's charm (the Girl Guide morality and gung-ho attitude) and homes in on it. Between these two amazingly written and performed characters, the audio drama decides to go crazy and brings us a boatload of creative supporting characters and scenarios; Banto Zame and Sally-Anne Stubbins! Killer robots protecting a precious artifact that turns out to be furniture parts! A parody of The Weakest Link where the audience are really dead this time! A big blob of jelly that only wants to watch some telly! It'd be an insane Doctor Who adventure to have just one of these elements... well, The One Doctor has all of them — and they all work like magic.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  Although this is technically a Christmas story, released to celebrate the festive season of 2001, I promise you that it'll be just as wonderful in any day of the year. The One Doctor is something special, a love letter to Doctor Who and all its silly edges and childish inclinations, and it keeps pushing the limits of how comedic Who can be. Where else would you get temporally unstable IKEA products, a fake port-a-potty TARDIS and Matt Lucas (well before his time as Nardole) as a villainous cylinder? I absolutely love this story, and I don't say this to any old Doctor Who adventure... but I could listen to it all day.