The Wrong Doctors (audio story)

The Wrong Doctors
Doctor:	Sixth Doctor
Companion(s):	Mel
Main enemy:	Stapleton Petherbridge
Main setting:	Pease Pottage, 1987
Key crew
Publisher:	Big Finish Productions
Writer:	Matt Fitton
Director:	Nicholas Briggs
Music:	Simon Robinson
Sound:	Simon Robinson
Release details
Release number:	169
Release date:	January 2013
Format:	2 CDs, 4 Parts
ISBN:	ISBN 978-1-78178-051-0
Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories
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The Wrong Doctors was the first story in the 2013 trilogy featuring the Sixth Doctor and Mel Bush.

Publisher's summary

With Evelyn gone, the Doctor sets course for his destiny... in the form of his first meeting with Miss Melanie Bush, a computer programmer from the village of Pease Pottage, currently busy rehearsing with the local Amateur Dramatic Society — and blissfully unaware that her future is on its way, in his TARDIS.

Make that two TARDISes. Because at that very moment, a slightly younger Doctor is flying into Pease Pottage, too — returning his future companion Melanie Bush to her rightful place and time, after they were flung together during the course of his Time Lord trial.

Time travel is a complicated business — the iguanadon terrorising Pease Pottage being a case in point. But how much more complicated could things possibly become, if the wrong Doctor were to bump into the wrong Mel?

Cast

• The Doctor - Colin Baker
• Melanie Bush - Bonnie Langford
• Stapleton Petherbridge - Tony Gardner
• Jedediah Thurwell - James Joyce
• Mrs Wilberforce - Patricia Leventon
• Vaneesh / Millicent / Christine Bush - Beth Chalmers
• Ksllak - John Banks

References

• The younger Doctor is wearing his multi-coloured coat whereas the older Doctor is wearing his blue one.
• When the older Doctor realises he's crossed his timestream he realises it is not another incarnation with their scarfs, frills or celery.
• The younger Doctor describes Mel as invisible and ineffectual.
• When she first met the younger Doctor, the younger Mel believed that he was going to audition for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
• At the age of eight, Mel committed the names of 150 different species of dinosaurs to memory and is therefore able to recognise an iguanodon on sight.
• When Petherbridge talks about wiping him from existence he talks about his travels with the scholar, the thief and the girls you met and never met… or are they yet to come.
• Stapleton Petherbridge was born in Pease Pottage in 1758. He was impressed into the Royal Navy in 1810 and was killed during the War of 1812.
• Jedediah Thurwell was born in 1812. He was deported to Victoria, Australia, where he met a woman named Patsy. They later married and had four children and fifteen grandchildren. He died on his farm in 1884 at the age of 71.
• Petherbridge refers to the creatures that live in the Time Vortex such as the Vortisaurs, Chronovores and the Pantophagen.
• Muriel Wilberforce was born in 1884. She and her husband Francis Wilberforce were married in 1910 while their son Francis Wilberforce, Jr. was born in 1912. Her husband was killed in the First World War in 1914. After World War II, she continued working at the Pease Pottage Post Office until she was well past retirement age. She was the chairwoman of the Pease Pottage Women's Institute from 1922 to 1964, serving in that position for longer than anyone else. She died in 1964 at the age of 80. During the 1980s, her grandson Martin Wilberforce ran the post office.

Notes

• This marks the first appearance of Bonnie Langford as Melanie Bush in a Big Finish audio drama since AUDIO: The Vanity Box in July 2007.
• This audio drama was recorded on 1 and 2 May 2012.

Continuity

• In the older Doctor's personal timeline, his companion Evelyn Smythe has recently left the TARDIS to marry Justice Rossiter on Világ. (AUDIO: Thicker than Water)
• Mel's address in Pease Pottage is 36 Downview Crescent. (PROSE: Business Unusual; AUDIO: The Juggernauts)
• Mel tells the younger Doctor that she is supposed to be reunited with his future self on Oxyveguramosa. (PROSE: Business Unusual)
• The younger Doctor thanks Mel for testifying on his behalf at his trial. (TV: The Ultimate Foe)
• The younger Doctor mentions that his future self is wearing Necros mourning colours, namely blue. (TV: Revelation of the Daleks)
• The younger Doctor uses K9 Mark II's dog whistle to control the Baryonyx . (TV: The Ribos Operation)
• The older Doctor refers to his encounter with Harry Houdini. Prior to their arrival in 1963, his first incarnation and his granddaughter Susan Foreman met Houdini in the United States. Houdini taught the Doctor how to perform sleight-of-hand tricks. (PROSE: The Sorcerer's Apprentice)
• The older Mel mentions taking dancing lessons from Miss Fairs (PROSE: Business Unusual) and visiting the museum with her uncle John Hallam (AUDIO: Catch-1782) during her childhood.
• As the younger Mel dies, she tells the older Doctor that she prefers his multi-coloured coat. He promises to begin wearing it again. (TV: Terror of the Vervoids)
• The older Doctor advises his younger self to brush up on his history and recommends that he take a trip to Sheffield Hallam University. (AUDIO: The Marian Conspiracy)

External links

• Official The Wrong Doctors page at bigfinish.com