JS Doctor - The Augury of Death

One Hundred And Forty-Sixth Entry in the YOA Unauthorized Programme Guide Finite Imagination Appendix O' Just Sitting Watching Flowers In Rain


10D - Augury of the Dustbins -

CD Blurb
---------------

"No! Not again! If I'm going to play your games, whoever you are, it would be nice if you stopped trying to kill me every time I roll a six!"

Throughout his years of traveling, righting wrongs and challenging injustices the Doctor has been... noticed. Noticed by very perverted beings indeed. And now, because of this, the Doctor is alone: he's lost the TARDIS, he's lost Dara and if he's not careful he'll lose something that actually matters! Like his lives, for instance.

To escape, the Doctor must form an unthinkable alliance with one of his oldest and most pop cultural of enemies; testing his ingenuity to its very limits to abandon Dara and recover his phone box of time.

Set squarely between the Doctor and his freedom are the shiny claws and incinerating lasers of a unit of non-biodegradable Trod warriors - ruthless robots who run on static electricity, but still don't count as copyright infringement so don't get your hopes up!

And if THAT wasn't not enough, the Doctor must come to terms with the shattering realization that he himself has now become... a commodity! His most precious resource, his very thoughts, will be sold to the highest bidder! Oh, how we hate 1980s consumerism! Will the Me Generation ever die?

Did the Sixties count for naught?!

ANSWER ME, DAMN YOU!!!




Plot Summary
--------------

A strange conglomerate of insect-like beings with incredibly fake Russian accents in an office are having a production meeting. They decide that it's time for them to boost ratings for their show, Super Celebrity Slaughterhouse: Big Bloodbath, with some more interesting contestants.

Aboard the TARDIS, the Doctor and Dara are being typically rude to each other as they discuss the plans for the weekend. The Doctor wants to visit Prague 1887 to see his former incarnation declared honorary president of the Magic Circle, and Dara wants to do absolutely anything else as long as it bores and upsets the Doctor and makes her look hot.

Suddenly a the TARDIS is transfixed by a cheap CGI whirlwind which removes the bickering duo from the time machine and relocates them to the incredible quarry planet of Beta 15 on a Tuesday in the year 8000000000 AD. The Doctor decides to explore to find some sort of civilization while Dara bitches and screaming and shrieks for absolutely no good reason, and goes nuts when the Doctor completely ignores her by whistling "Heard It Through The Grapevine".

The duo find a squad of Trods have conquered a nearby settlement of tea-sipping British Raj who happened to be in the area. The Trod Commander suspects that these pampered and very stupid aristocrats are clearly responsible for suddenly transplanting them to Beta 15 and thus decide to line them and recreate the sodomy scenes from Pulp Fiction by forcing them to drop their trousers, bend over and have their mouths gagged.

Dara decides to watch the torture with opera glasses, while the Doctor gets off his ass and goes down to confront the Trods and tell them off for this clearly being stupid and unnecessarily buggering helpless human prisoners who think that all the Atlas is pink and have mistaken these conical silver robots as demmed colonials in fancy dress.

The Trods instantly recognize the Doctor as their ancient enemy - since on Trodos, every day begins with the entire Trod species being shown images of the Doctor's face on screens eight miles high and ordered to incinerate him on sight. Thus, the Doctor and Dara flee to avoid being bitch-slapped by their mighty mechanical claw-hands.

Dara shouts at the Doctor for daring to endanger her hotness while trying to aide lesser beings, so the Doctor throws her down an embankment into the milling Trods, leaving her to suffer the sodomy she so voyeuristically sought. The Doctor bravely hides in a nearby cave and sings happy songs to himself.

Meanwhile, those insect dudes use their wacky power beams to snatch a Dustbin trooper out of time and space (just when it was about to exterminate the Doctor) and transpose it to a cave on Beta-15 (where it prepares to exterminate the Doctor). Our hero instantly recognizes this Dustbin as the one kidnapped before it could kill him, and swears violently about the dramatic irony before him.

The Doctor cunningly escapes extermination by waiting for the Dustbin to say "YOU ARE THE DOCTOR, YOU ARE THE ENEMY OF THE DUSTBINS!" and simply replying, "No," and explaining he is a hotdog salesman from downtown San Francisco and offers to take the Dustbins' order.

The Dustbin, never the brightest mutant in the incubation tank, believes him and thus does not shoot him down where he stands. The Doctor decides to nickname the Dustbin "Chavros" and they become a wacky odd couple destined to become the best of friends.

Dara meanwhile manages to escape the hideous fate the Trods have in store for her by telling them she is a princess and the hottest human female who ever walked the galaxy. The Trods, not realizing Dara is borderline psychotic, assume she is telling the truth, even when she identifies the planet variously as Chicago, Washington, Acapulco and Mexico.

The Doctor and the Dustbin approach the outskirts of the Raj, as the incredibly camp and smug insect-like beings watch on and congratulate themselves over the wonderful plotting and characterization in the story so far.

The Trods are now so utterly confused and with no other way to get intelligence, decide to "fall back on tried and trusted methods" - which involves disemboweling the human prisoners and examining their guts to divine exactly what the hell is going on. The reserved British Raj let loose a volley of foul language at Dara for her egomania leading directly to this.

Dara's demands for room service lead to her receiving a mighty Trodos slap and being dragged to the sacrificial altar when the Doctor and the Dustbin attack. The Trods could easily fight off this pathetic resistance, but are horrified to realize their prediction by reading human entrails did not foresee this in the slightest and the whole thing is pointless!

As the Trods start a Three Stooges' style punch up, the insect creatures transpose Dara, leading the Doctor to wonder if all his years of prayer have finally been answered and God has come to rescue him from the bimbo.

But as a final act of spiteful stupidity, Dara unwittingly reveals the Doctor's true identity by screaming "Oi! You! Doctor! The guy in the magician's outfit! Hey! Enemy of the Dustbins! Time Lord called the Doctor! HEY!" as she was kidnapped. The Dustbin angrily rounds on the Doctor and, deeply emotional, demands to know just when the Doctor was going to share this info?

The Doctor smiles coyly at the Dustbin, flutters his eyelids, playfully dragging a finger down the cave wall... and then runs like fuck.

The Dustbin moves to follow when a Trod squad arrives and the two static-powered conical cyborgs stare at each other for a long moment before the Dustbin grates the immortal words, "WHICH ONE OF YOU BITCHES WANTS TO DANCE?!"

Outside the cave there is the sound of synthesized voices squealing like pigs on a honeymoon as a heap of crumbled tinfoil gets blown out the cave entrance followed by shouts of, "Right, I'll do you for that!" and "Fucking trashcan bastard!" and more explosions.

The Doctor runs atop the mountain over the cave, and sees a crevice opening onto the cavern where the Dustbin is stricken and shouts, "Chavros! Up here!"

"HOW THE HELL DO I GET UP THERE?!" the Dustbin protests.

"Uh... fly?"

The Dustbins stares him. "I HADN'T THOUGHT OF THAT," it admits. "ELEVATE!"

The surviving Trods swear loudly as the Dustbin floats up out of the cave into the sunshine, like some kind of Gilbert and George artwork trying to be as offensive to established religions as it is possible to be.

For a moment the Doctor and the Dustbin embrace manfully as they recover from their near death experience. The Doctor promises to make it up to the cyborg by giving it a lift to some garbage planet where the last of the Dustbins can live out its life doing what it loves, cleaning and tidying. The Dustbins agrees and all is forgiven.

And as the Doctor turns away, the Dustbin furiously fires its neutralizer ray at the Time Lord's back, but all that elevation stuff has drained its batteries and nothing happens. When the Doctor looks back, the Dustbin pretends nothing happens and whistles innocently.

As the Doctor and the Dustbin find a derelict spaceship lying in a heap of rusting ruins and the Doctor immediately starts talking like an Estate Agent and suggesting it is a perfect ship once it's had a lick of paint and a bit of "fix me up" DIY and the Dustbin is immediately told to choose a wallpaper pattern.

Dara awakes surrounded by unconscious men with a splitting hangover and no idea where she is. So, as you can imagine, this is reassuringly normal for our bombastic bimbo, and she soon annoys the fellow prisoners into telling her she's in a holding cell in a space craft in orbit about Beta-15 and can she please just shut the fuck up and let them go back to sleep?

Dara declares herself the only person who is hot enough to be chairperson of the Escape Committee and immediately criticizes every possible approach for being, in her words, "dumb". Meanwhile the other prisoners decide it would be far more productive if they all just set up a freelance law firm and ignore Dara utterly, while a strange old man in the next cell called Milo Clancy sings, "My Darling Clementine" to himself in order to drown out Dara's voice.

Clancy discovers that his third molar contains some explosive, thanks to the fact his dentist was a psychotic paranoid who was quite right to believe Clancy was giving his wife a "good, Southern-style poking". Thus, they get Dara to fake an orgasm to draw some of the giant grasshopper people to the cell door, and then use the exploding tooth to escape.

And so we have the most surreal escape-capture routine ever known, as giant insect men flee from a broken tooth as a fifty-year-old in a school uniform makes incredibly unbelievable happy noises and a grey-haired prospector rounds up a bunch of British nobility and runs off through a space station.

Scenes like this are what makes Doctor Who different from every other damn thing in the world, and sure justifies MY worrying obsession with this kid's show - what's RTD's excuse, huh?

Meanwhile, on Beta-15, the Doctor and the Dustbin have managed to use the cunning application of throw rugs and scatter cushions to restore hull integrity and repair the engines. To celebrate, the two aliens cheerfully start singing the old country ballad, "Rust in Dust" for no adequately explored reason. Nevertheless, their raucous off-key singing masks the approach of the surviving Trods, who motor their way very loudly over the quarry to their ship.

Dara and her curious allies stumble across a kitchen near the prison complex, and a TV showing the events on the planet below on pay-per-view. The escapees immediately abandon their exodus and sit down to watch the TV and maybe have a cup of Java while they do it. Proving herself even more stupid than before, Dara tries to talk to the Doctor through the TV. When Milo Clancy explains the Doctor cannot hear her, Dara misunderstands him and shouts louder at the TV.

The other escapee prisoners finally snap and throw her down the stairs and go back to watching TV.

The Doctor and the Dustbin manage to launch the space shuttle and despite all the laws of physics don't instantly explode in the atmosphere. The grasshopper people realize that the Trods are on board the ship and this is causing viewers to turn away since it's gotten all boring and predictable.

The aliens decide to use their magical energy beams to transpose everyone on the shuttle back onto Beta-15, but Dara has unintentionally inserted herself head-first into the workings of the beam, rendering it useless. The concussed bimbo immediately starts congratulating herself on saving the Doctor from certain death. This is ironic, what with the fact that she has left him trapped in a spaceship full of Trods and now that the beam is broken, the grasshopper people decide to use their Death Star technology to shoot the spacecraft down!

However, by the time the laser gun sights are properly aimed, the shuttle has already crashed into the side of the orbiting space platform and the Doctor, the Dustbin and the Trods have fled in different directions so as not to be on the scene when the cops show up.

The fleeing aliens then bump into Milo Clancy and run away screaming again. As they hide in the linen cupboard, the Doctor convinces the Dustbin and Trods that they are in the middle of Super Celebrity Slaughterhouse: Big Bloodbath and there is one way they can escape; agree to a temporary truce and wait for the dwindling audience figures to get the show cancelled.

Even though the Chief Executive of the grasshopper people is becoming psychotic with fury at the lack of "educational infotainment", the Dustbin and the Trods suggest they just go around shooting everyone and then go home for tea.

The Doctor protests at the horrible loss of life, but realizes he doesn't actually care that much, plus Dara might be part of the collateral damage and agrees. To make sure of maximum carnage, he decides to repair the Dustbin's offensive weaponry, but as with all DIY jobs there is plenty of circuits and cables left over but he's confident the cyborg is now lethal.

The Chief Executive desperately tries to boost ratings by capturing Dara and hooking her up to a quite unnecessarily painful death machine involving drills, barbed wire, super glue, forks, a cage full of plague rats, an electric fire, and finger guillotines. He also suspects that the Doctor and his allies will mount a desperate rescue attempt on Dara, but the Doctor gleefully tells the others not to move a damn inch still she's dead.

Suddenly Milo Clancy and the Raj soldiers reveal they are actually android bodies holding small, puppet-like alien creatures called Arquillians - a race of power hunger space stock brokers who the Doctor decides to blame for the Wall Market Crash for reasons known only to himself. Clancy reveals that the Arquillians have been hired by the Universal Shopping Channel to buy out the Super Celebrity Slaughterhouse: Big Bloodbath's studio facilities by ruining their share price by making the program very complicated and dull.

Even more viewers tune out during this explanation, showing what a true evil genius the small typical Grey-looking slug in the android shaped like a stocky, heavily-moustached Texan in his early sixties wearing ridiculously tight pants, a garish tartan shirt and a pink neck-scarf. Guess you never can tell which sad gay icon might really turn out to be an evil alien mastermind in disguise.

Clancy reveals that he intends to sell the video of this story to sci-fi fans everywhere, and make an incredible shitload of cash out of it as well as defeating the galaxy's intergalactic crime fighter and part time magician!

The Trods announce they are "completely fucking sick of this" and open fire on the Arquillians, but Clancy releases a 100 tonne weight which drops and crushes the robots into tinfoil.

The Dustbin glides forward and opens fire - but promptly explodes in a fireball. The Doctor stares glumly at the burning wreckage and awkwardly admits that maybe he should have checked the wiring before he sent the Dustbin into battle. So saying, he turns to run for it, but Milo Clancy is too quick for him, and the Doctor is trapped.

Clancy reveals he has a supremely evil idea - rather than simply throw the Doctor into an arena on Beta 15 and let the other monsters there kill him, instead he shall allow the Doctor to go free in the TARDIS. The Doctor can't believe his good luck, until he ordered at gunpoint to leave with Dara as well, who is now safe and sound and making wisecracks about her hotness. Again.

Swearing bloody vengeance on Milo Clancy, the Doctor and Dara leave in the TARDIS. Clancy laughs evilly, only to realize that the grasshopper people have fled the space station and decided to blow it up for insurance!

Clancy flees using the dury-rigged time space transposing machine, in an incredibly obvious bit of sequel fodder.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor miserably concludes that even a psychotic alien cleaning machine would make a better companion than Dara, then cheers himself up by turning on some light music.



Books/Other Related Material-
Doctor Who & The Last of the Dustbins
Ka Faraq Gatri: Nice Guy, If You're a Biped
"Throw The Trod Into The Dustbin: Sci-Fi Martial Arts Manual"


Links and References -
The Chief Executive gathered together the most mighty enemies the Doctor has ever known - the Dustbins, the Trods, the Cybermen, the Snotarans, the Impresarios and the Metatraxi in a desperate attempt to capture viewer loyalty.


Untelevised Misadventures -
The Doctor last met the Metatraxi when he and Ace turned Stonehenge into a giant satellite dish so that a 1969 hippie festival would ultimately prevent the rise of data vampire space piracy as part of Comic Relief, a reference to the unmade story "Live Aid" (Serial 7R).



Dialogue Train Wrecks
---------------------

The Auger: Que sera sera sera!
What will be, will be, will be!
The future's not ours to see!

-------

Dustbin: DUSTBIN TIDYING TECHNOLOGY IS WITHOUT EQUAL! OUR DISINFECTANTS ARE THE GREATEST IN THE UNIVERSE! THE DUSTBINS ARE THE SUPREME BEINGS!

Doctor: Supreme? With a broken squeegee for a hand and the visual acuity of Lord Nelson? Come off it, you glorified cleaning woman's bucket! No wonder you never score with conversational skills like that!

Dustbin: DO NOT YOU PUSH ME! DO NOT YOU PUSH ME! DON'T YOU FUCKING PUSH ME!!

-------

Doctor: Dear old Edgar Allan Poe said the best way to hide something was in plain view. Or was it Arthur Conan-Doyle?

Dara: Are you sure it wasn't... Conan the Barbarian!!

Doctor: Shut the fuck up, Dara.

Dara: Or was it Conan... the Librarian!!!

Doctor: SHUT UP!!!

-------

Dara: Oooh. Waking up in a place I don't recognize with a head as thick as a whale sandwich, with lots of men I don't know the names of... Like being back at school... This is turning out to be the second biggest round of group sex I've ever had.

Clancy: When was the first?

Dara: Yesterday. God, I am SO hot!!


Dialogue Gems
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Doctor: Next stop, the Magic Circle in 1888!

Dara: Oh, what a wonderful day this is going to be. Stuffy old men with dusty hair and no conversation discussing how to pull a hat out of a rabbit. Fascinating.

Doctor: Oh, piss off you maligant whore.

Dara: We're stranded without water in a desert with no name on a planet heaven heaven knows how far from the TARDIS! My feet hurt! I'm thirsty and hungry and tired and ratty and... DOCTOR! KINDLY PAY ATTENTION WHEN I'M RANTING AND RAVING! DOCTOR!! AND NOW IT'S GETTING ON MY NERVES! LISTEN TO ME SO I CAN SHOUT AT YOU IN PERSON!

(The Doctor punches her lights out.)

-------

Doctor: The red wire's connect to the control disc!
The control disc's patch to the main board!
The main board's a mess of tangled plastic!
Now hear the word of a Time Lord!

-------

Clancy: Dara, lie down and make like you're ill!

Dara: Are you having a laugh? Is he having a laugh? "A prisoner taken ill in cell?" That's got to be the number one with a bullet in the Dumb Plan To Escape Chart in the middle of this raw display of testosterone! Today we announce the sad death of logic, it passed away peacefully in this rubbish script. No flowers, please. Just who wrote this drivel anyway?!

-------

Doctor: Mmm. Poor Chavros. I'm responsible for its death. And any death is wrong, Dara. Except yours, of course. Chavros and I were companions for a while, a wacky odd couple. Every fight for cleanliness has winners and losers, Dara. The Dustbins never asked to be created, after all. Just following the program that was shaped by their DNA. They were victims too... Oh, who cares? We're still alive, aren't we? Not just alive, we're living... LIVING LA VIDA LOCA!



Listener Reviews
-----------------

"Hey, this is a total rip off of I, Dustbin!" - Casual Fans (2005)


"Hey, this is a total rip off of D'you Believe This?!!" - Rob Shearman (2003)


"You know in Rhyme of the Dustbins when the Dustbin says, 'WE DEFY AUGURY', that's obviously the official statement that the SCADs are not canonical. Or it could be a coincidence since the SCADs are so canonical that Big Finish never knew about them enough to even subtly denounce them. Hah! You suck, SCADs!"
- Ewen Campion-Clarke (2004)


"At last! The Dustbins are no more and now fandom can embrace a more positive replacement, a race that would make the Dustbins look like pokémon babies! Yes! The SCADs can use the Quirks! This fan audio series will set me up amongst the Gods! THROUGH THE SCADS, THE QUIRKS WILL BECOME THE SUPREME BEINGS!!"
- The Creator of the Quirks (1999)


"Phew, what a loony." - The Creator of the Trods (1999)


"Highly enjoyable - especially if you've never seen or heard anything by Rob Shearman. There is enough going on here to keep even casual listeners interested assuming they were tied to a couch and given psychotropic drugs to heighten their awareness to painful levels. But no matter what anyone says, Augury of the Dustbins is light years apart from C. Ecclestone's I, Dustbin. There's no resemblance at all! Anyone who says so is lying! FILTHY, DIRTY LIES! BE WARNED: YOU'LL BURN IN HELL FOR SUCH SINS!" - The Jeffrey Coburn Handbook (2000)



Jeffrey Coburn Speaks!
----------------------

"The Augury of Dustbins was good fun, despite the horrible production problems we had what with bombs going off, mass suicides and the armed terrorist siege. That's the trouble recording Doctor Who in the tradition of the old-style radio
broadcasts. It means we do it pretty much live and if some mad guy in a turban and a hook dives for the mike screaming abuse, we're kinda stuck with it.

I've lost count of how many stories we did had to be altered or rewritten to make sense of the stuff that happened in the studio. No one can afford tape for retakes, the cheap pigs, but it's an exciting way to do it. Usually, for voice work, you go in and record your lines and that's it. But here, with everyone all around you shouting their lines and at least one of them have a psychotic episode due to mixing their medication, lasers going off in the background, it's more fun than a barrel full of rabid monkeys! HAHA!!

Paul Ebbs wrote this one, didn't he? He creates some really great characters, and then a bunch of unprofessional untalented amateurs would ruin it all by giving inappropriate one-note performances in stupid voices. No wonder he went semi-professional, his work really needed to be showcased.

And it was. Well, RTD stole the whole story for the re-launch of 2005. That counts as spreading it to wider audience, doesn't it? I dunno what Paul complains about..."


Sheri Devine Speaks!
--------------------

"Memories of my time on this season would be, ah, rather blurred thanks to my newfound addiction to oven cleaner. I think the last one was Orgy of Dust, which was pretty different and hard to do.

on the difficult side. I remember there was a lot of screaming and pain for most of Orgy of Dust. It was a very depressing experience. At least three of the production killed themselves, which was way over average for the number of deaths in the average of stories we do. We're running out of space at the bottom of the garden with all these corpses."


Rumours, Slander, and Libel
---------------------------

For once production of the Superiority Complex Audio Dramas was ahead of schedule and it appeared they might actually complete a season inside of two years. Production seemed to be working out fine after Raymond Dugong's unpleasant and distinctly unhygenic departure from the organization, and the new replacement Joseph Medina was effortlessly keeping the show afloat with his brilliant writing talent and curious Trod fetish.

Phillips was still bitter after the ruination of his master piece, The Empire of the Dustbins Strikes Back!, a story meant to revitalize the Doctor's dusty nemesis which ironically not only made them look a thousand times more worthless than they were to start with, but also completely wiped them out, preventing further uses of the monsters. However, while listening to the story and slashing his legs with razor blades to take his mind off the hurt, he noticed this curious sequence from the final episode:

(care of http://bfwhoguide.bravehost.com/7Da.html)
Just then, a Dustbin arrives and prepares to exterminate the lot of them... only to vanish in a crude editing trick. The Doctor blinks. "Well, that was random," he says after a pause.


This scene, actually down to shoddy editing and ad libbed dialogue, meant that one Dustbin had somehow survived the obliteration of its species and this one miserable cleaning machine could be used to bring back the Dustbins in a new, tougher and bullet proof form to show just how powerful even one member of this once mighty sci-fi master race could be! The Dustbins would never be the butt of a humiliating joke ever again!

Phillips decided that the finale of Coburn's second series would be a new Dustbin story featuring the sole metal bastard kick ass in a way its ancestors never did; a single Dustbin more deadly, cunning and downright smart than any Dustbin army ever before seen. No mere evil cleaning machine killing everything in sight, but a manipulative, treacherous, cunning, ruthless and evil cleaning machine killing everyone in sight!

Unfortunately, the only script available was Paul Ebbs' "The Soothsayer of Fatal Death", a tale of corruption, predestination, anarchy, apocalypse, the break down of society and basically tons of other stuff cheerfully nicked from of the 1988 remake of Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall" with much, much more jailbait sex, animal possession, eye gouging and comedy Irishmen.

Ebbs was disgusted at the list of demands Phillips made and decided to abandon the entire plot and just keep the title in case it came in handy, instead focussing the story on a bunch of advertising executives who look like grasshoppers. Phillips was unimpressed with the story, now retitled "The Prophet of Absolute Oblivion" and pointed out that the Dustbin did not play a strong enough role in the story. Thus, Medina was ordered to work closely with Ebbs to ensure the story followed the path he wanted it to.

Medina was similar disillusioned with Phillips' rabid Dustbinphilia, and after the debacle of The Backpacker of the Night, was certain the producer had absolutely no idea whatsoever what really counted as quality entertainment. What's more, Medina had from the start of his stint as a script editor been building up the ferocious robotic Trods as the ultimate enemy of Doctor, and now he was expected to forget all about them to bring back the Dustbins?

Medina and Ebbs thus struck an alliance that the story - now entitled "The Augury of Absolute Fucking Armageddon No One Gets Out Of Here Alive" - would feature the last Dustbin in existence coming up against the Trods. The Dustbin would wipe the floor with the metal meanies from Trodos, but ultimately explode spectacularly at the end of the story, leaving the Trods the true masters of space in a sequence scientifically designed to give Phillips a complete nervous breakdown upon listening to the finished product.

Ebbs and Medina spent hours working out the plotting to ensure the Dustbin was borderline invincible, that the audience could palpably believe this single creature capable of conquering worlds, exterminating entire populations, and rebuilding the Dustbin Empire with no help whatsoever. Then they would make the Dustbin insanely stupid and would begin a torrid love affair with the Doctor, who would abuse the Dustbin's trust and destroy it, reducing it to a few scraps of metal that would be turned into a novelty ashtray as the Doctor read out a long speech about how rubbish it was.

Whether or not this subtlety could have fooled Phillips is lost to history - everyone was far too distracted at the time to study the intricacies of the script. Quite simply, as work finished up on Jeff Coburn's second season and 1997 drew to a close, word spread that the SCADs had not given any notice to the 1996 Paul McGann telemovie, and had not embraced it as canon.

This was a very, VERY bad move.

The Paul McGann Estrogen Brigade, furious at this snub, declared all out war upon the Superiority Complex Audio Dramas. The SCADs, typically, did not open their mail and thus were taken completely by surprise when recording of "The Organ-Grinder of Horror" (as the story was renamed) was interrupted by an armed siege by the rampaging fan girls.

The lunatic XX-chromosome terrorists stormed the unsanitary slum dwelling the audio dramas were using as recording studios. Dismissing the attackers as "one of those greaseball raving reds who seem to crop up everywhere since the BBC allowed to run Doctor Who", Phillips ordered everyone to keep acting as time was money. As ever, the story needed to be adapted for all the explosions, gunfire and girlish screams... which was a common enough practice amongst the SCADs.

By the time work began on episode two, the police and army had been called in, decided it was a false alarm and buggered off despite the clear sounds of machine gun fire, exploding grenades and the expression "We don't give a flying fuck about Paul McGann! He's not canon, you mad gun-wielding sluts!" being shouted repeatedly by Phillips himself.

The battle became so violent that Diane Colt - originally hired to play Milo Clancy - committed suicide by diving into the firing line and screaming "Take me Jesus, give me the liberty of DEATH!!!" This proved to be damn annoying so they simply gave Jym de Natale helium so he could impersonate Colt when playing Clancy for the rest of the recorded material.

Jan Morgan meanwhile fought the leader of the PMEB to death and seized control of the entire cult. While this ended the SCAD jihad, it meant that while he lead the brigade back to Blighty, everyone left locked in the recording studio with no food or water, forcing them to eat the corpses left behind by the battle.

Ebbs was revolted by the un-professionalism of the SCADs and by the time the caretaker found them and released them, had completely rewritten the script as its own sequel named "Prophet of the Dustbins" which he intended to try and sell to the BBC or the fledgling BBV audios. Or indeed ANYONE who was willing to pay him money for this dross. Ultimately Rob Shearman took possession of the idea after he Roshamboed Ebbs for it.

As 1997 ended, Phillips had the satisfaction of completing Jeff Coburn's second season in just two years - half the time it took to do the previous season. The Doctor was no accompanied by one companion, UNIT, the Bastard and the Dustbins had been completely rehabilitated, there was no televised Doctor Who to get in the way of their supreme canonicity and the world was looking bright! He had absolutely no idea that his script editor was determined to destroy him and everything he stood for, but after listening to Augury, everyone else twigged.

In the late 21st century, the SCADs started to produce e-novels showing past and unseen adventures of their own Doctors - Missing Adventures For Past Doctors, if you will; an idea Richard Segal was certain had never been done before, or at least not as well as the semi-literate text-speak dribble that was being churned out on their crappy internet forum.

The first was set after Augury of the Dustbins and entitled "The Union of Corruption Versus Illness of the Monoids" pitting the Doctor and Dara Hamilton against the Beatle-wigged, cross-dressing monocular Monoids from the William Hartnell story The Lark. The Monoids in turn would be allied with the Serve You Rights engaging a pitched battle against the Saigon Palace II restaurant chain from Target: Saigon and their allies the Mentors of Thoros Beta, which would revealed to be under attack from the Protons, the evil subatomic particles from the Patrick Troughton story The Protons. The Protons, in a final twist are revealed be under the thrall of the mighty Quirk Empire from TV Comic.

When it was discovered the Creator of the Quirks was writing the e-novels, the SCADs cancelled the entire chain and told everyone that the e-novels and their contents were nothing more than hallucinations brought on by psychotropic drugs in the water supply.

It is on record that someone in Cardiff believed this story absolutely, and used it as the key stone for the sexy Captain Jack Sparrow spin off saga Touchwood, where it is discovered that no matter what alien weirdness occurs, the Welsh will always just assume there's LSD in the water table.

Finally, here are the lyrics to the "Rust In Dust" song that Ebbs and Medina sang throughout the story to celebrate the utter destruction of the Dustbins and the ultimate triumph of the Trod Confederacy:



Dustbins! Stupid Dustbins!
What were you thinking?
The Doctor, he wiped you all out!
And it's your fault he got away!
You stupid Dustbins!

The first time that you left Fargo
You really shoulda oughta thought ahead!
Trying to conquer the universe
Even though you can't see the colour red?

Trying to keep the cosmos clean?
So you treat the cosmos mean
But did you ever think
You might all end up D-E-A-D?!?

Dustbins! Stupid Dustbins!
What were you thinking?
The Doctor, he wiped you all out!
You painted a bullseye on your face,
You stupid Dustbins!

Finally got your world blown up
And got shoved all the way to the brink
By that badly-dressed little anarchist
Did you never ever stop and think?

What the hell is wrong with you?
Don't you know what NOT to do?
You had call the Doctor for some H-E-L-P!

Dustbins! Stupid Dustbins!
What were you thinking?
The Doctor, he wiped you all out!
And you were just begging for it,
You're such stupid Dustbins!
What were you thinking?
The Doctor, he wiped you all out!
And no one cares that you're gone!
YOU STUPID DUSTBINS!