It’s a lovely idea for a Christmas-themed Short Trip, to take the kind of story you might once have read in an old Doctor Who annual, give it a sprinkling of seasonal magic, and then get the evergreen Peter Purves to sprinkle some magic of his own over it. But alas, O Tannenbaum doesn’t quite work, in spite of some lovely moments and some terrific ideas, perhaps because it tries to recreate something so associated with a particular version of the past but in an alternative format.
There isn’t really a plot as such. The first Doctor and Steven arrive at an isolated, mountain cottage on the day before Christmas, to discover the little girl who lives there apparently alone just as an alien invasion of sorts is about to happen. A fairly minimal amount of exposition – sandwiched between a handful of more proactive discoveries – leads to the Doctor assessing what the problem is and, of course, putting it right just in time for Christmas Day.
It’s all rather spooky with a hint of Christmas ghost story. Purves’ reading is gentle and beguiling, yet dynamic enough when called upon. And there’s a running joke about the little girl’s legs that doesn’t really pay off but at least brings some levity to a story that doesn’t rely on humour.
The issue, maybe, is with a television TARDIS team fetching up inside an annual style story, a conceit that in and of itself is only problematic insofar as that with Steven’s voice on the soundtrack, it makes suspending your disbelief just that little harder to follow when expecting him to trust in a universe far more simplified than the one he usually inhabits. This might have been a great approach to take, particularly as the sci-fi themed stories of the Hartnell era are not exactly renowned for their sophistication, and so the first Doctor and Steven aren’t as hard to accept in such a situation as, say, the sixth Doctor and Peri might be. But the circumstances in which they find themselves are necessarily so thinly sketched in and the guest characters so mono-dimensional, and crucially the resolution such a triumph of conservatism over progression – all common traits of the source material this story is seeking to emulate – that ultimately O Tannenbaum ends up feeling insubstantial and lacking for imagination.
Which is a shame, because it’s entertaining enough and invokes quite a decent sense of place while managing to include a Christmas theme as part of its main scenario without it feeling too much of a contrivance. This isn’t poor, by any means. It just isn’t quite as quirky and surreal as it needs to be to make itself rewarding and distinct.
DOCTOR WHO SHORT TRIPS: O TANNENBAUM / PUBLISHER: BIG FINISH / DIRECTOR: LISA BOWERMAN / WRITTEN BY: ANTHONY KEETCH / STARRING: PETER PURVES / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
