An audio drama set to still images by Big Finish and broadcast on BBCi

2002 was an interesting time for Doctor Who fandom. There were persistent murmurs that the BBC planned to bring the show back after being cancelled some fifteen years prior, but with the 40th anniversary approaching and no proper television revival in sight, the franchise was being kept alive in other ways. This included a handful of animated web series on the BBCi website, alongside the many novels that had sustained the brand throughout the 1990s, and the relatively new (at the time) Big Finish audio dramas, a line that continues to this day. This was also right around the time I got back into Doctor Who myself. I had picked up some DVDs at my workplace, the now-defunct chain Hastings, which pulled me back into the fandom. From there, I found my way onto the Outpost Gallifrey message boards (or at least I think that was the name when I joined – it changed a few times). For an American who had grown up watching the show on PBS and then wondering for years what happened to it, the sheer volume of material that had emerged when I started poking around on the fan sites was overwhelming. Still, things like Real Time felt genuinely exciting at the time. The BBCi website for this still exists, but with Flash no longer being supported, I have no idea if there is a way to play this still, thankfully, it’s not “lost media” yet, as many have put most of these webisodes onto YouTube in the years since including upscaled versions that look far superior to the original 360p version.

“On a planet known only as Chronos, two scientific survey teams have vanished. Inexplicably. Without warning. But with just one clue supplied – a single screamed word: “Cybermen!” The University they worked for has called in the Earth security forces who despatch a third team, a mix of military and scientific might, under the auspices of a University Administrator. If that kind of volatile grouping isn’t bad enough, three strangers have been added to the mix – a young human expert in Cybermen and a mysterious traveller in space and time, the Doctor, along with his companion, Dr Evelyn Smythe. But can they solve the riddle of the vanished survey teams before the Cybermen harness Chronos’ unique temporal gifts and rewrite the history of the galaxy?”

Real Time used a very early, experimental, and somewhat crude, form of animation created in Adobe Flash. Rather than full character animation, it relied on stylized still images, limited movement, sliding pans, zooms, and symbolic visuals synced to the audio track. This sort of style had been used a lot in the early DVD era, as companies like Marvel Comics created what were ostensibly audio dramas as a narration to popular comic book storylines with limited animation just like this. Characters were often represented by portraits, silhouettes, or other still images, with backgrounds shifting to suggest location changes. This approach kept production costs low while allowing the story to be experienced visually, making Real Time an important transitional experiment between pure audio dramas and later, more fully animated Doctor Who releases including the numerous “Missing Episodes” releases from about a decade later. There were six episodes produced, and a hell of an unresolved cliffhanger, as the BBC abandoned doing BBCi

For all intents and purposes, this was essentially a Big Finish production funded by the BBC, the previous Web Series Death Comes to Time, was made in-house and as a result has a different “vibe”, whereas this feels more “right” to me as a fan of Big Finish. Real Time brings together familiar Doctor Who talent both in front of and behind the scenes, anchored by Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor and Maggie Stables’ Evelyn Smythe, a fan-favorite companion making the jump from Big Finish into an official BBC production. The supporting cast includes notable genre voices such as Nicholas Briggs and Yee Jee Tso, who previously played companion Chang Lee in the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie. Here, Tso takes on the role of Doctor Goddard. Gary Russell serves double duty as writer and director, while Alistair Lock’s music and post-production work play a major role in shaping the atmosphere, especially within the Cybermen.

This episode introduces a couple of interesting ideas, most notably a subtle maturation of the Sixth Doctor. His wardrobe shifts to a blue version of his previously colorful patchwork costume, partly to simplify the animation, but also to move away from one of the character’s longest-running criticisms from non-fans: that the Sixth Doctor looked clownish and was hard to take seriously. This harder-edged take on the character, without reverting to the outright abrasiveness seen during his early regeneration sickness, is a welcome adjustment and one of the reasons Colin Baker’s Doctor remains a personal favorite of mine.

The episode also makes a conscious effort to restore the Cybermen’s horror and menace, continuing on from what Big Finish had done with the excellent Spare Parts. Rather than the lumbering robots stomping around they had increasingly become, here they are portrayed as survivors of an intergalactic war between two factions, desperately short on resources. Their cyber-conversion process is imperfect, resulting in partially cyberized victims, an idea that would later appear multiple times in the modern series. While I admit the visual designs in the web animation are not entirely to my taste, sometimes resembling metal bikinis, the concept itself is far more unsettling, especially when experienced in audio form. The seal the deal on this concept, I’m tipping my hat to the sound design and voice work of Nicholas Briggs, as the partially completed Cybermen have similar voices to the original Mondasian cybermen from the First Doctor Era, while some mature ones sound like the typical 70’s and 80’s iterations. It almost makes one wonder if the cloth-faced Cybermen were being retconned as incomplete in some way, and I almost wish that would have been portrayed here in the webtoon.

In Real Time, the Cybermen exploit a temporal anomaly on the planet Chronos to advance their long-term goal of time travel and universal conversion. Their ultimate aim is to gain access to the TARDIS, recruit the Doctor as a new Cyber-Controller, and rewrite history to expand their influence across time. The Cybermen are operating from a site that has rather conspicuously reported a rash of disappearances, including two survey teams. A third survey team is sent out to investigate, consisting of scientific and military experts, as well as the Doctor and Evelyn Smythe. We learn that the Cyber-Controller exists in the distant future, at a point when the Cybermen are nearly extinct following massive sectarian warfare. They eventually flee to Chronos using a series of time portals, but all attempts to travel back through time fail, as the troopers’ cybernetic implants begin to disintegrate on the other side, which is why they ultimately need the TARDIS.

This series is one of many that plays around with time travel, but I am not sure it is handled particularly well here. Structurally, the plot unfolds as a time loop, where every attempt to stop the Cybermen results in some form of one-upmanship, reminiscent of how time travel works in something like the Bill and Ted franchise, and while this is conceptually interesting, it occasionally veers into slightly silly territory. One example is a plan to stop the Cybermen using a virus that turns metal into flesh, only to discover that they had already anticipated this and developed the exact opposite virus. The concept itself is interesting, but it does not hold up particularly well under closer plot analysis.

I get the impression that one of the goals here was to present the audio drama in “real time,” in the vein of shows like 24, which at the time was inspiring a wave of series to experiment with that narrative structure. It sounds compelling on paper, but in execution I found the story lacking. Large portions of the webcast consist of characters standing around delivering dense, expository dialogue to one another. At times it feels less like drama and more like characters reading Wikipedia entries about the Cyberman War and time travel aloud. That problem is compounded by how many moving parts the story is juggling – temporal paradoxes, diverging timelines, and, to use a later term, “timey-wimey stuff.” Rather than being pulled in, I often found myself letting the dialogue wash over me while focusing on secondary details like the character designs, things I really should not have been paying attention to instead of the narrative itself.

Overall, I felt the acting here was solid, very much in line with other Big Finish productions. Colin Baker is at his best in audio, and Evelyn Smythe remains one of my all-time favorite companions. Having Yee Jee Tso involved again was a nice touch – reprising his TV movie role might have been even better, but he performs well regardless. Despite my reservations about the story itself, the production values were top-notch across the board.

This story can be experienced either as an audio drama or as an animated webcast, but it honestly works far better with the visuals. One of its biggest flaws is a cliffhanger that has gone unresolved for nearly twenty-five years. While a continuation could theoretically happen, several members of the cast are no longer alive. From what I have gathered, the BBC largely ceased collaborating with Big Finish on projects like this afterward, creating some bad blood between the two. As a result, it seems unlikely – and perhaps not even worthwhile – for the story to ever receive a proper conclusion. I guess, as it stands, Real Time is an example of what would happen if The Doctor got things wrong, and allowed one of his rogues to win the day.

Overall, I respect this project for its ambition. It filled a real void during a period when “proper” Doctor Who simply did not exist, while also serving as a gateway for new fans into the Big Finish audio range. I have a lot of nostalgia for it, having discovered it during a broader nostalgia kick, which inevitably colors my feelings. That said, this is not one of Big Finish’s stronger offerings. Like several early releases, it is overly complicated and likely would have worked better as a novelization with more room to breathe. I cannot imagine this converting a new viewer into a fan; it was made squarely for long-time fans, which likely explains why it was never continued. Before revisiting this, I had forgotten there were earlier webcasts, and I plan to check them out soon. With only four produced before the TV revival halted everything, it should be manageable.