Show 70: Doctor Who – The Macra Terror
Posted: April 7, 2010 Filed under: Doctor Who, Patrick Troughton, Podcast 3 Comments »Hello listeners! Good Lord, we’re back. Hard to believe eh? It’s more than any of us could have hoped for/dreaded. And what have we been doing with all this time off you might ask?
Many things actually, most of them absolutely nothing to do with the podcast.
Nevertheless, we’re back and kicking bottom. Which is just as well as we’ve all had a dose of crabs and are itching to get stuck in to The Macra Terror. Oh yes, you thought that holiday camp in Delta and the Bannerman was terrifying, well it’s got nothing on this place, let me tell you…
As always you can subscribe via iTunes or download directly from here
Oh yes, and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks for the next show. No, really, we will. We’re properly back and everything…
So get a cup of tea and a biscuit (the cure to all problems), sit yourself down and remember: THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS MACRA!!!!
In a rare egregious error you seem to think The Evil of the Daleks and The Macra Terror were the only early audio versions of Dr Who missing stories. This is of course nonsense. There was: The Power of the Daleks and Fury from the Deep (commentaries by Tom Baker), Tomb of the Cybermen (commentary by Jon Pertwee). The last of these was famously a missing story when they made the audio but by the time they issued the tapes it was not only found but out on VHS. Well done for an otherwise excellent podcast because of which I forgive your huge mistake.
All the best,
ATB.
Alan Butcher’s beaten me to it re the accuracy of your comments re the old audio-cassette releases of Missing Stories, but I’d add a couple of things –
From what I remember from the DWM coverage, Eric Saward didn’t do the narration on the original releases – he was brought in for the second batch of releases in 1993, starting with Power of the Daleks.
Either way, the narration on these later releases is much improved, slightly more conversational, and is now in the voice of the Doctor. Oh, plus, there’s a gratuitous reference to Terileptils.
Seemingly The Macra Terror is the only one of those early releases not to have the narration re-written and re-recorded for the cleaned-up CD releases, as all of the others have. As you say, the narration on the earliest releases really does suck (in particular there’s a lengthy fight scene in Evil of the Daleks with no narration whatever), but I’m rather fond of Tom Baker’s narration of the Dalek stories, at least in terms of atmosphere.
Indeed, when the first set came out, Evil of the Daleks did so well that it was the first Spoken Word release to enter the top 100 on one of Gallup’s charts.
Hi chaps, I stand corrected! Having listened back to the podcast I definitely stated that they were the only ones – despite knowing full well that they weren’t because I had Power and Fury on cassette myself! What was I thinking??
What I really meant to say was that Macra and Evil were the first. Tomb, Power and Fury didn’t appear until a full year later (June 1993).
The narration on the first two was actually written by JN-T before his contract with Worldwide was terminated. The second batch had narration by Eric Saward.
There. All sorted. Now stop complaining and see how many bizarre plot holes you can find in The Beast Below (there are quite a few I promise you…)
P