Lord Barset

Lord Barset was a hereditary title on Earth. It was given to at least two human explorers involved in Antarctic expeditions in the 20th and 21st centuries; they were respectively a grandfather and his grandson.

The grandfather

In 1929, Lord Barset unearthed a city of intelligent "lizard men" with superior technology beneath the Antarctic ice. He wrote about this in his diary. All but one of the expedition died in the encounter; the expedition's ship, the Rochester, having been lost. This crewmember was discovered holding Lord Barset's diary; he was seemingly driven insane and died just a few days afterwards. (COMIC: City of Devils; AUDIO: Frozen Time)

The grandson

The diary of Lord Barset was secretly passed down to his grandson, another Lord Barset. Lord Barset was granted a licence to go on an Antarctic expedition to both find the remains of his grandfather's expedition the lizard men's city. He wanted to control the technology he thought was buried there for himself without brand executives getting in his way and selling it off into "a million competing franchises".

Lord Barset arrived in Antarctica in the Fortitude in 2012. When his people failed to make radio contact after six days, he and several others from the Fortitude arrived to the dig site with arms. There, instead of the city his grandfather found, he discovered the remains of an Ice Warrior maximum security prison, where the Seventh Doctor was thawed.

In a "quest for knowledge", he had the Ice Warrior war criminals, led by Lord Arakssor, thawed. Lord Barset and Captain Harman were trapped inside the prison, while the Doctor, Geni and Mac left in Aristo One. Barset and Harman tried to escape to the Fortitude, but Harman was killed by an Ice Warrior's sonic weapon, and Lord Barset was injured and presumed dead. Discovering the Doctor and Geni had returned, he worked with them to stop the Ice Warriors altering the structure of Earth's greenhouse gases to cool down the planet and make it into Arakssor's "fortress".

As the process started, Lord Barset was knocked out by giant falling hail. The Doctor and Geni put him in a small chamber for him to recover. When he woke, he shot at Lord Arakssor, allowing the Doctor to boost the signal to get the attention of the warship of Red 0089. Arakssor then killed him. (AUDIO: Frozen Time)

Behind the scenes

The grandson Lord Barset was voiced by Anthony Calf in Frozen Time. The grandfather, who died decades before Frozen Time's main setting, did not appear in a flashback and had no performer in the story; however, he was voiced by Joseph Howard in Nicholas Briggs' Audio Visuals story Endurance, to which Frozen Time was a sequel.