Nightshade

Big Finish Productions Nightshade

Adapted by	Kyle C Szikora
Format	Compact Disc
Released	2016

Starring Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred

Synopsis: Professor Nightshade - tea time terror for all the family, and the most loved show in Britain. But Professor Nightshade's days are long over, and Edmund Trevithick is now just an unemployed actor in a retirement home, fondly remembering his past. It's the same through the entire village of Crook Marsham - people are falling prey to their memories. At first harmlessly, and then, the bodies begin to turn up. The Doctor and Ace arrive on the scene - but, with the Doctor planning his retirement, it may be time for Professor Nightshade to solve one last case.

• Crook Marsham Revisited by Niall Jones

Crook Marsham Revisited by Niall Jones 14/1/25

'Mark Gatiss divides his time between writing and acting. In 1991, four of his plays were performed in London fringe theatres ('absolutely contemporary, utterly truthful --- and hilarious.' City Limits). He is currently working on several projects for television.'

City Limits may have long since folded, but this description of Nightshade's author, found on the book's blurb, remains true. However, much else has changed since Nightshade's publication in 1992. It was written as part of the Virgin New Adventures, the series of books that kept Doctor Who alive following its cancellation and which took the series in new, darker and more adult directions. By 2016, when Big Finish released an audio adaptation of Gatiss's novel, Doctor Who was once again a hugely successful TV series and the Virgin novels were, with a few exceptions, long out of print. While they may have been remembered fondly by fans and even provided inspiration for the revived series, they seemed like a relic from the past.

But if novels like Nightshade are just an obscure, if interesting part of Doctor Who's history, why adapt them? One reason for doing so is to make the stories accessible to fans, saving them from having to track down increasingly rare second-hand books, sometimes at inflated prices. If this were the sole aim, however, it would probably be simpler just to republish the novels. No, the reason you make an audio adaptation is to hear Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace. In Nightshade, Gatiss perfectly captures the Seventh Doctor's voice --- his pomposity and the bathos of him having to explain himself. On arriving on Earth, the Doctor refers to 'a continuous precipitation of condensed oxygen and hydrogen compound', which, it turns out, is just a particularly obtuse way of saying 'it's chucking it down'. McCoy and Aldred slip effortlessly back into their roles and hearing them speak lines so precisely calibrated to their characters is a joy. It brings the story to life in a way that would not otherwise be possible.

Nightshade takes place in the small Yorkshire village of Crook Marsham around Christmas, 1968. The Doctor has come to this 'blissfully ordinary and untroubled' place with the intention of retiring, but strange things are starting to happen. Memories are stirring and people are dying.

The story's village setting evokes Third and Fourth Doctor serials such as The Daemons or The Android Invasion, which feels appropriate, given the novel's preoccupation with memory and the lure of nostalgia. Despite this, the plot doesn't follow traditional Doctor Who patterns. There's no UNIT and the alien threat takes an abstract form. Moreover, it's a threat to which the Doctor himself is vulnerable. For a force that feeds on memory, a Time Lord is catnip. In both versions of the story, the Doctor is presented as feeling old and tired. He wants to stop running, is riddled with self-doubt and finds himself increasingly drawn towards his own past. In particular, he is haunted by memories of Susan.

Given the reduction of the story from a 230-page novel to a two-hour audio drama, it was inevitable that Kyle C. Szikora's adaptation would have to cut aspects of the plot. On the whole, this compression works well. The audio adaptation is leaner and more focused around the Doctor and Ace. This comes largely at the expense of chapters that focus on supporting characters; while their removal makes the story feel less expansive, it makes sense given the time restraints. In fact, the audio adaptation has fewer characters full stop. The story instead focuses on a smaller core cast, including Edmund Trevithick, a curmudgeonly retired actor who relives past glories by watching repeats of Professor Nightshade, the 1950s Doctor Who-esque TV series in which he starred, and Robin Yeadon, the local boy with whom Ace falls in love.

Although the reduction in the size of the cast generally has little effect on the plot, there is one absence that does affect the tone of the story. In the novel, Vijay Degun is a young British Asian man who works at the local radio telescope. Vijay prefers Peter Noone to Jim Morrison, but would never admit it, and wants to marry his colleague, Holly Kidd. He is also the victim of appalling racism from his superior, Dr Hawthorne. Gatiss explicitly describes Hawthorne as a racist, noting that, 'as a young man, he had walked a hundred miles to hear Oswald Mosely speaking'. The inclusion of Hawthorne's attitude suggests a desire by Gatiss to address social issues head-on, continuing down a path laid by serials such as Remembrance of the Daleks. The novel's focus on racism is admirable and necessarily uncomfortable, particularly in its inclusion of racial slurs. That these are used not just by Hawthorne, but also by the pub landlady (an otherwise pleasant character) suggests that Gatiss's use of language aims to create an unvarnished portrait of the 1960s. The inclusion of this language is undoubtedly shocking, although justified by its context. Of course, there is no way that a more family-focused audio adaptation would ever be able to include such language. It is a shame, however, that the novel's focus on racism is removed completely, along with its only non-white character, while Hawthorne remains.

The other major difference between the novel and the audio adaptation is the ending. In the novel, the Doctor betrays Ace, introducing an animosity between the two that would play out in later stories, whereas, in the audio adaptation, he respects Ace's wishes. This change is not only significant at the level of plot and character, but also in the way that it reflects differences between what Nightshade was in 1992 and what it has subsequently become. Both versions of the story present a vision of the Doctor and Ace's adventures post-Survival, but they are not necessarily the same vision. In 1992, Nightshade was part of an ongoing series, with the story of the Doctor and Ace's relationship developing in Paul Cornell's Love and War and beyond. Although Big Finish have also adapted Love and War, they did so four years earlier. As a result, the two audio dramas don't have the same chronological relationship as the novels, making Nightshade a standalone adventure that requires a more definitive ending.

These changes reflect the fact that Big Finish's Nightshade is a reimagining of Gatiss's novel for a new medium, not a reproduction, although many of his best lines remain. While certain things are lost in translation --- such as much of the period detail --- audio adaptation brings its own benefits; in particular, the format's ability to tell a story through sound. The significance of the Professor Nightshade TV series to the plot makes the novel particularly well-suited to audio, and the adaptation takes the opportunity to dramatize extracts from the series, the sound distorted to evoke the experience of watching a 1950s programme on a 1960s TV. It even playfully begins with a stern warning from a continuity announcer that, 'In our opinion, the following programme is not suitable for children or those who have a nervous disposition'.

The move from the page to the CD makes Big Finish's Nightshade a kind of paradoxical reverse novelisation. A Big Finish audio drama may feel more like Doctor Who than a Virgin novel because it includes actors' voices and is therefore like a TV episode minus the pictures, but it is also more peripheral. When Nightshade was written, it was written not as a spin-off or as a piece of merchandise, but as Doctor Who. After Doctor Who stopped being a TV series, it effectively became a line of books. Post-2005, however, it has become, once again, emphatically a TV series, making work in other media feel somehow unnecessary. As a result, Nightshade today is not as vital as it was in 1992. This doesn't mean that listeners shouldn't be grateful, however. Nightshade may not be needed in quite the same way, but this atmospheric, well-produced adaptation shows that it remains a story worth telling.