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:	[[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 took his companions to the great exhibition in 1851. While Charley met the Duke of Westhampton, C’rizz became kidnapped by a local street thug and put on display as a freak; the Doctor saved a French couple from assassination by letting them into his TARDIS, but got mistaken for their assailant when the TARDIS dematerialised all of a sudden. In prison he met the real assassin and inadvertently helped him escape. The next morning a woman claiming to be his wife posted his bail. The woman kept trying to convince him that he was her husband but after another incident with the assassin, he is told that she already knew. She needed his likeness to fool her husband’s uncle so that she and her children would be able to keep their home. The Doctor decided to play along with the charade and returned to the Crystal Palace afterwards, where he found 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.
• Francesca Hunt (Georgiana Marlow) is the elder sister of India Fisher (Charley Pollard) in real life.
• Paul McGann, India Fisher and Conrad Westmaas all play dual roles in this story.
• Ron Moody (The Duke of Wellington) was offered the role of the Third Doctor but turned it down, a decision which he later regretted.
• 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 1910's or 1920's. (AUDIO: The Next Life)

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