The Crowmarsh Experiment written by David Llewelyn and directed by Nicholas Briggs

What’s it about: When attacked on an alien world, Leela falls unconscious… only to wake in another time, another place. She is in the Crowmarsh Institute on Earth, in London, in 1978, and everyone is calling her Doctor Marshall. They tell her the world she has known is but a fantasy, a delusion, and that this place is the one that is real. Surrounded by familiar faces on unfamiliar people, Leela knows what is true and what is false. But how long can she believe when everyone around her says it’s a dream? What’s really happening here?

Teeth and Curls: It just goes to show how personable Tom Baker makes the Doctor. Here he is playing a clinical Doctor who has no compunction in sticking a needle in Leela’s arm and interrogating her. Tom Baker refuses to hold back in these sequences, playing the part of the other Doctor with a stillness that I found quite unsettling. I think they could have pushed it even more and had him a downright unlikeable, even nasty character.

Noble Savage: For Leela, having her identity questioned is a disturbing revelation. After all the one thing she is sure of in an ever changing universe (thanks to travelling with the Doctor) is who she is, how she thinks and feels and acts. On a purely performance level it is wonderful to hear Louise Jameson being handed material as challenging as this and of course she is more than up to the test. I love that the ‘dream’ of the Doctor and Leela travelling in the TARDIS is described as farfetched. Leela talks factually about her parents rather than emotionally, but she has a positive opinion of them. She has children within the Crowmarsh setting, but she resists the idea strongly. Leela is playing along with what she believes to be a fantasy, and thinks the Doctor is cunning enough to play along too. She thinks it is all part of some important scheme. Leela can remember how it felt to lose Marshall and so it is a moment of cruelness when she is confronted with the children that she could have had with him. Because it made her happy to be held by her ‘child.’ Leela reaches a point where the idea of staying at Crowmarsh becomes more palatable than continuing travelling with the Doctor (a loving husband, children, a career). Leela questions whether she is dreaming at the climax or whether she was dreaming at Crowmarsh.

Sparkling Dialogue: ‘Look around you Leela! Which seems the more likely fiction; and alien world with flying robots or London on a rainy Monday afternoon?’
‘Somewhere in the universe your daughter is waiting for you to come home.’

Great Ideas: A ziggurat, a distress signal and airbourne robots screaming through the sky, The Crowmarsh Experiment certainly opens with a lot to say for itself. The Doctor and Doctor Leela are colleagues at Crowmarsh and together they are the architects of Project Cissifuss. A psychological experiment using a combination of hypnosis and drug therapy to project a dream into the test subjects mind. A dream so vivid that they remember it as an experience from real life and the dream spills over into their waking life into the real world. Imagine a weapon that instead of destroying cities could obliterate ideologies. A weapon that in just one night could disenchant every citizen living under a dictatorship. If the people dream of violence or war, change the dream. Read that back again, this is not the kind of concepts that I expect to be bandying around with the 4th Doctor on audio. How very refreshing to have such a bold and unusual idea at the story’s core. In reality, Leela is being harvested on an alien world, kept in a dream state whilst the planet gobbles her up.

Audio Landscape: Simple audio punctuation that doesn’t overwhelm the drama; a pen scratching on paper, a heart monitor, a tannoy system. I loved the sound effects for the characters being dissolved into pixels within the Crowmarsh setting, and the flying robots sound pretty cool too.

Isn’t It Odd: The only think I could think of when Marshall was introduced was ‘who the fuck is that?’ which gives you an idea of how disposable some of these 4DAs are. That he appeared in a previous story and had a connection to Leela had completely slipped my mind in a way that the more vivid of romances that have blossomed in Big Finish stories haven’t. Fortunately, we had Jameson’s pained performance to guide us through this scene and make it count. She’s really very good. Perhaps The Crowmarsh Experiment plays it’s hand a little too early, with the Doctor contacting Leela before the end of the last episode. It means we don’t really have enough time to buy into the delusion before we are informed it is an illusion. It’s not an insurmountable problem though, because this is still a very personal journey for Leela.

Standout Scene: The Doctor getting to talk with ‘the Doctor.’ Tom squared is boggling.

Result: Existential exploration is not something I expect from this range and the trial that Leela goes through is beautifully conceived and written and makes a mockery of previous comic book attempts at this sort of thing like The Evil One. This is an idea I have seen played around with on many shows from Deep Space Nine (Far Beyond the Stars) to Red Dwarf (Back to Reality) to Buffy (Normal Again) to The X-Files (Field Trip), the notion that the characters that we have been following are a fiction and their real identity are now revealed and explored. It’s often a highlight of the respective shows and it proves no different for the 4DAs, for which this is about as experimentational as they come. What a delight to be using words like that in a review for a Tom Baker story. It’s a story that relies on creative ideas and character interaction rather than a dependence on audio set pieces like a soundtrack of a televised story. In essence, this is what audio drama is about. And what a showcase for Louise Jameson, who is brilliant in even the most uneducated of scripts but really gets to sink her acting chops into something meaty and worthwhile here. I love that she chooses not to play any of this story hysterically but at a disquietingly still level, a woman trying to come to terms with some pretty shocking revelations. My only real criticism is that this could have been even more psychologically probing and disturbing, Leela could have been taken to some very dark places. But that doesn’t take away from how enjoyably unique this story proves to be. Something is happening with this range that I am not at all accustomed to, after my positive reaction to the previous four stories I am starting to develop a taste for the 4DAs and look forward to them. Perhaps this is because it is a range that has finally put the right people in the right places behind the scenes (John Dorney as script editor is a brilliant move, I can see him edging this range into a more innovative, less nostalgic direction) or perhaps it has been around for years now and flogged wistfulness for the 70s to death and is ready to emerge as a more mature, less predictable series of stories. Whatever the reason, The Crowmarsh Experiment (one or two niggles aside) sees a continuation of the upswing in quality and proves to be a striking instalment in its own right: 8/10