Unseen 6th Doctor - The Nightmare Fair

Serial 6Z/1 - The CareBare Nightmare Fair
The CareBare Nightmare Fair
An Alternate Programme Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
An Extract From The EC Unauthorized Programme Guide O' Arcadia Unbound



Serial 6Z/1 - The CareBare Nightmare Fair -

Hungover Liverpool dosser Kevin Stoney is stumbling around the deserted Blackpool Pleasure Beach in the half-light just before dawn when he bumps into a naked man running for his life as a strange red glow seeps from the Ghost Train ride and forms into a seven-foot cloud. The cloud then turns into a CARE-BEAR!

A Care-Bear then pursues the naked man through park and snuggles him to death – leaving only a scattering of smoking dust which slowly dissipates into the breeze. Impressed, Kevin runs to Detective-Inspector Truscott and reports seeing strange lights, glowing faceless giants and a happy-looking French man in tight leather pants. However, after three night waiting for a repeat show, Truscott accuses Kevin of wasting police time and what's more, getting him all excited. The DI beats him up with his truncheon and storms off, frustrated.

The TARDIS, meanwhile, has materialized on top of the Blackpool Tower – much to the disgust of its occupants Sil and Peri. They specifically asked the Doctor for them to go anywhere BUT Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and where are they?

The Doctor defends himself, explaining that the polarity of the neutron flow was reversed, hurtling the TARDIS into the primeval cauldron of space-time, a nexus leading straight to this funfair. As justification, the Doctor offers the fact that his cravat is different, Peri's hair is longer and Sil is now bright green – classic examples of Danger Zone Vortex travel.

Trying to change the topic, Sil turns their attention to the funfair below. "There's nowhere else like it in this galaxy," the Doctor explains, prompting Sil to suggest they build one out on the rim of the Crab Nebula. The Doctor insists you can't build a funfair for a mere purpose and suddenly announces he feel extremely homicidal; Peri and Sil are going to have fun or he will kill them both.

However, just as they're starting the Big Dipper, the Doctor hears a voice in his head calling his name. He follows the voice to the amusement arcade, suspecting that, perhaps, some invisible alien fancies him and is looking for a bit of fun. Sil desperately tries to convince Peri to ditch the Doctor and let them have fun somewhere that ISN'T 20th century Earth.

Meanwhile, Kevin Stoney is kicked out of the local police station after his wild claims of leather-clad dominatrix pain games prove false. Spotting what looks like Ronald McDonald having a psychotic fit followed by a diminutive slug and an American video-jockey in a tight white sweater, Kevin decides to follow them.

The Doctor, getting severely worked up by the kinky sex-talk the voice is whispering in his ear, initially decides that the Laughing Sailor outside the House of Fun is the cause of the voice and begins to fondle it. "Is that laughter supposed to be jolly?" Peri asks.

"Depends on your sense of humor," Sil replies. "But I suppose it's a lot less disturbing when the Doctor isn't making out with it."

"What ARE you looking for?" Peri demands.

The Doctor zips up his trousers. "Nothing," he replies quickly. "He reminds me of someone I once seduced... Or, rather, something. Nasty little tacky homosexual stereotype pet of a fellow called Magnificent Bastard, but that was about nine seasons ago."

"Then that'd be a very pointless continuity reference now."

"Yes, that WAS the idea, rather."

With this rather awkward gap in the plot over, the Doctor, Sil and Peri decide to enter Space Mountain, a strangely phallic-shaped space rocket containing a rather disappointing ghost ride within. The Doctor has now twigged that Kevin is following them, and starts giggling girlishly as he believes that the rough diamond Liverpudlian fancies him. At the Ghost train ride, the Doctor acts disgracefully, refusing to let any other customers on the train apart from him – he's keeping the seat next to him free for Kevin.

However, the ride attendant – another "Aye, lass" stereotype – is so irritated he starts the train early. The train returns empty, as the Doctor has been abducted by rubber-suited thugs and dragged down the service tunnel. The customers partake of the ride and, oddly enough, Sil suffers the same fate.

Peri attempts to complain to the ride boss, but gets nowhere until Kevin joins in and threatens to call in the police, whereupon said policemen arrive and take them prisoner. Kevin and Peri manage to escape and flee into the shut-down Broken Neck Gap ride, but as they search for a way out, the animatronic miners come to life and begin to sing "Darling Clementine" at them.

Peri snatches up a pick axe and starts killing miners left, right and centre – only to discover that the miners were actually real midgets and not the sophisticated androids she'd initially assumed. Eventually Peri realizes that Kevin is only interested in porridge, but when she confronts him, he vanishes into thin air and she is captured by the guards. All in all, an ordinary for Peri the midget slayer.

The Doctor and Sil, meanwhile, are imprisoned in a cell which has been specially prepared for the Time Lord – there are roundels on the walls and a mirror for him to preen before. The pipes in his cell begin rattling rhythmically and he realizes that someone on the other end is attempting to communicate, but he initially believes that the message is in Morse code. This is bad, because he doesn't understand Morse code and ends up believing his cell is located near a Chinese Laundry.

Suddenly, the cell door begins to dematerialize, revealing their captor – the Sexual Toymaker, clad in his distinctive tight leather pants, and his aide, Cyril the Copyright-Infringing Schoolboy.

"You!" the Doctor cries, delighted, and moves to embrace the Toymaker, only to be stopped by an invisible barrier.

"My dear Doctor," the happy-looking Frenchman replies, "Forgive these tedious formalities, but I feared your impetuous nature might bring us both to regrettable harm without some form of restraint."

"Kinky... I like it."

"So I believe. I've waited so long for this meeting, I've had plenty of time to make up FOUR play when one would do."

"Oh, very witty. Is this another one of your stimulating games?"

"Not stimulating, no. I do have plenty of those, but this is just one big tease!" So saying, the Toymaker dematerializes the wall separating the cells to vanish, to reveal not the Chinese Laundry but, instead, a six foot tall, PVC-clad hunk who very closely resembles Edward Scissor-Fingers. It is... the Masochist. The Doctor instantly begins to chat up the monster, via tapping of pipes.

However, their courting is cruelly halted by the Toymaker, and instead Kevin, Peri and an arcade game are thrown into the cell instead (ostensibly to practice his skills). Furious, the Doctor kicks the arcade game apart in a frustrated rage.

Pleased at the torment he is causing the Doctor, the Toymaker turns his attention to his computer mainframe room, where Yatsomatomotomatomotomoo, Head of Games Research, is developing the ultimate video game "Attack of the Fanged, Kick-Boxing, Nipple-Free Flying Vampire Bikini Babes". Unable to contain his excitement, Yatsomatomotomatomotomoo starts playing the thunderously realistic game (which depicts a lone player's battle against rompy sex monsters in a blasted red-light district) and quickly loses his three video game condoms. Suddenly, a red Care Bear steps out of the screen and kills him by molesting him to death...

Dispatching the Care Bear back into the machine by kicking it violently in the groin, the Toymaker tells Cyril that, after tonight, they will go cruising for chicks in California.

Back in the cell, the Doctor has built himself another sonic screwdriver out of the parts of the video game, all the while complaining about the immortal Toymaker's delight in playing fetishist role-playing game. Sil, however, believes the Doctor is secretly envious of the Toymaker's unknown origin and magical powers.

Just then, a peroxide blonde called Shardlow arrives offering the Doctor 'coffee' in the toilets down the corridor, and the Doctor assures him that he's brought his own percolator. However, moments later the infuriated Doctor returns with Shardlow's wig and makeup crying, "Do I LOOK heterosexual??"

The Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to dematerialize the cell's walls, allowing the Masochist to enter the cell, along with a rather confused plumber who was only here to clean the pool and a rubber plant. The Doctor and the Masochist manage to communicate and lay... er, plans for what to do to get out of the cells.

The Toymaker sends Cyril to snatch the Doctor before he can get his end away and drags him to the control room. Initially, the Doctor wonders if he is going to be forced to play the complicated Transvestite Game again – it is, after all, sitting in the corner. However, the Toymaker dismisses the Transvestite Game as "*so* 1966" and has "Attack of the Fanged, Kick-Boxing, Nipple-Free Flying Vampire Bikini Babes" ready to go.

The Doctor begins the game, totally confident he will win and also beat every high score ever made EVER. After about three seconds the Doctor is losing badly and claims that the Toymaker's presence is, in fact, putting him off. He then realizes that the Toymaker actually WANTS him to win, simply so he can experience a bit of sub/dom stuff.

He also realizes that the game portrays a single player, lost and alone in an aggressive sexual world -- and comes to understand that the Toymaker is alone in this Universe, cast out from his own by some unimaginable catastrophe. Indeed, he has become part of this dimension, creating the neutron flow which the Doctor has depended on for over twenty seasons...

"Whichever bouncer it was, it hurled you from your Universe into this one. You carry your own marital aides with you, obviously, but different from ours... Fetishes! That's the key! Your libido is receding so fast it's pushing your time back as it goes... You'll become a virgin! For millions of years!"

"I have done," the Toymaker replies, almost a whisper.

"The isolation of aeons. The crushing boredom of thousands of millennia. You must be GAGGING for it!"

"Then I grew tired of sleeping around," the Toymaker snarls, "Town prostitutes, cities, continents, whole planets even! I aroused life, I played hard to get, I did every position in the Karma Sutra... for millennia, for hundreds of millennia, for thousands... Until I came too quickly, wantonly, willfully, in the same town prostitutes, the same planets I had helped liberate! And that too stopped turning me on. I have yearned for domination, Doctor. For the release which has eluded me for more time than many worlds have existed. Until now, I had no means... Nothing from this Universe could screw me, until now..."

"You can prattle all you like, Toymaker. I'm VERY frustrated!"

"I hope so, Doctor. I truly, truly hope so. Linked into the machine is a porno-relay linked to your libido – if you win, the orgasmatronic energy it releases will send me into blessed ecstasy."

"What? You climax?? If that absurd score is beaten, you get a vinegar stroke? I don't believe you – you always were a sad wanker."

"Yes, Doctor – but this way I get lucky whatever happens!"

"But you're the polarity of the neutron flow! If you die, I'll never have cheap technobabble to escape the evil retards in the universe! I'll never be safe from anyone or anything again!"

"Which will no longer be of any interest to me, Doctor!"

Just then, the Masochist grabs the Toymaker and begins to fondle him and the Care Bear escape the video game and goes on the rampage. Using his sonic screwdriver, the Doctor manages to reverse the trajectory of the proton source and download the Care Bear, the Sexual Toymaker and the Masochist into the computer game. They will be trapped in there forever, but at least there can be lesbian animal threesomes.

The Doctor orders Peri and Sil to carry the arcade game back to the TARDIS, for possible future use on those cold, lonely nights... and leaves Kevin Stoney to take over the underground base, enslave aliens and live as a gangland boss under the funfair.

Book(s)/Other Related -
Doctor Who Has A Holiday At The Taxpayer's Expense
Dr. Who & The Sexual Toymaker Get It On
Kevin & Peri Go Large
"See? I Told You Blackpool Amusement Park Was Evil!" by R.L. Stine

Goofs -
You can clearly see Sil fall out of Big Dipper and plummet, cursing, to the ground, but when the ride is over, he's beside the Doctor and Peri as if nothing had happened.
"It's a man's voice!" the Doctor announces with glee, only to, moments later, despairs "Male or female, I can't tell! Maybe I should lash myself to the mast, just to be on the safe side..."

Technobabble -
The Doctor criticizes the Sexual Toymaker's "use of fluid lines provoked by the ergonomic imperative rather than the strict use of conceptual space and the strict adherence to the symbolic form".
The Toymaker's reply is, "For Christ's sake, Doctor, it's just a light switch!"

Links and References -
A reference to the long-forgotten events of "Paris Sucks" -
Doctor: My dear Mr. Stoney, can't you trust the evidence of your own eyes? Or are you one of those fellows who has to go around hitting things all the time? Slept with a chap like that once. In Paris. Well, WITH Paris to be strictly accurate, but that's completely by the by...

Untelevised Misadventures -
The single line, "My, Doctor, you HAVE changed," inspired Gay Russell to write a 217-page BBC novel entitled 'Devoid Of Loyalties' featuring the Fifth Doctor, Adric, Tegan and Nyssa encountering the Sexual Toymaker on the planet Arsebandit 51 where they were forced to take tabs of LSD and do a 10-piece jigsaw - and it was only Adric's foul depravity that distracted the Toymaker long enough for the time travelers to snatch some duty-free and leg it.

Groovy DVD Extras -
Your own version of "Attack of the Fanged, Kick-Boxing, Nipple-Free Flying Vampire Bikini Babes" which you can play on your remote. However, I have not been brave enough to enter the game as this story shows that a horny Frenchman, Edward Scissor-Fingers and a Care-Bear are ready and waiting to leap out and kill me.

Dialogue Disasters -

See the Doctor's comments above re: tying himself to the mast.

Some brain-crushingly bad exposition -
Sil: And just who is this "Toymaker"?
Doctor: I don't know. Nobody knows. He was fiddling with naughty things before the start of Time Lord records - and he broke a few of them once they'd started. There was an attempt to trace his path through the red light district, but the researchers quickly got rather... er, distracted. As my colleagues do so often, they met something they didn't understand and played hard to get. If they'd been able to seduce him, they would taken the relationship further, I'm sure. But they couldn't, so they didn't.
Peri: A being the Time Lords couldn't score with??
Doctor: Oh, there are lots of THEM. Time Lords generally aren't very good at handling naughty things, especially their own. I'm just the exception to the rule.
Sil: Suuuuuuuuure.
Doctor: We do know he's bisexual, and we do know he's into bestiality. We know he can withstand the most violent sexual positions in our experience – he was once observed playing with a supernova as though it were a gents' urinal. And we know he's horny beyond imagination.... Sorry, drifted off there. Most of all, we know he likes leather!



Dialogue Triumphs -

The Doctor's crushing dismissal of his imprisonment -
"Prison cells. All the same. Made to keep little knobs out and big knobs quite definitely IN!"

Toymaker: Fascinating fairground, isn't it?
Doctor: Yes, it is.
Toymaker: Your favorite, by all accounts...
Doctor: Yes. Is that why you came here?
Toymaker: The flexibility of the locals is really quite remarkable.
Doctor: Is THAT why you came HERE?!
Toymaker: And they do so love making visitors feel... welcome.
Doctor: HAVE YOU COME HERE FOR ME?!?
Toymaker: My dear Doctor! The last time we met, you were a victim of your own sexual frustration, which now seems to have developed into full-blown nymphomania!

Doctor: No, no, no! Those circus midgets do not exist! Not THAT one, anyway...
Kevin: Then why does it hurt when she slaps me?
Doctor: Because she's treating you like the bitch you are of course! What do you expect to feel when a circus midget slaps you silly? Warm all over?
Kevin: Well... yeah.
Doctor: Ah, yes. Good point.

Toymaker: At one time, it's true, I held a passing interest in your peccadilloes through time and space, but the idea that I should pimp myself in this amusing but depressingly backward funfair waiting for you to "get in the mood" is fucked up in the extreme!
Doctor: But YOU reversed the polarity of the neutron flow...
Toymaker: Doctor, I *am* the polarity of the neutron flow!

Viewer Quotes -

"It's complicated, confusing and with characters that have no purpose it's just really silly – just like Season 17. What's the link? Graham fucking Williams, that's what the link is! This story confused me, it's awful and avoid it all costs. Damn it, I wish I'd written this!" - Nigel Verkoff (2005)

"What's the point of having the Doctor landing in Blackpool and go to the pleasure beach if it has no relevance to the story? Why does the Sexual Toymaker want to develop computer games that killed people? Wouldn't it be better if he used the rides at the Pleasure Beach as traps which would at least have something similar with the original story in? Still, I suppose he wouldn't have to do much." - Occupation Health & Safety Review (1987)

"Bisexual alien bondage freaks at Blackpool! DOCTOR WHO RULES!!!" - Ian Levine (1986)

"Whenever I went on the indoor rides in Blackpool, I always wondered what lurked in the dark places I wasn't allowed to go. I used to imagine what it must be like for the workers, after hours. There must be a maze of passages that they use, that the public just can't see. Seeing as the Doctor, Peri and Sil spend lots of time in these "unknown" passages - this story ruined my dreams and tainted my childhood forever more." - Tony Grunt-Splatter (1997)

Psychotic Nostalgia -
"As tacky as Blackpool is, there is something remarkably alluring about all the bright lights, toffee apples, kiss-me-quick hats and penny arcades. Not to mention the alien sex workers and bondage freaks from the dawn of time. This story rocks!"

Colin Baker Speaks!
"I couldn't wait to get stuck into the Sexual Toymaker story. However, I remember Michael Gough not hearing the 'story' part, and acting rather nervously around me. Got quite awkward. That bit where I tried to hug him and I couldn't wasn't scripted, but they managed to dub out his line 'Stay away from me, you weirdo!' with 'Ah, Doctor, good to see you again'. Marvelous thing, editing."

Rumors & Facts -
During the screening of Season 22, rumors had abounded regarding the possible axing of Doctor Who, most of which started by BBC Controller Michael Grade for the sheer hell of it. Amazingly enough, the BBC took notice and immediately began to move to daytime TV, canceling or cutting the budget of almost every BBC program that involved police boxes, time traveling or dustbins. Already, "Professor Gamble's Antique Roadshow" had bitten the dust and "Devious Dan's Homemade Police Boxes" was also in trouble, while "Robbie Coltrane's Police Boxes, Dustbins And Time Machines" didn't even get off the ground. Doctor Who's future was rendered uncertain when a new soap opera called Eastenders was added to the schedules to draw resources away from every television show starring Colin Baker and produced by John Satan-Turner.

One Wednesday 27 February 1985, the BBC finally stopped fannying about and announced that the longest running sci-fi series was to end, mainly to encourage other sci-fi shows to buck their ideas up and beat Doctor Who's record. Anxious fans worldwide, worried that this might mean an end to the Time Lord's travels and – worse! – force them to get together some sort of social life, flooded the BBC with letters of protest. Grade responded by beginning a paper plane competition with every letter he got marked 'Doctor Who'.

JST finally gatecrashed Grade's office and reminded him that, if he was interested in cash, it was costing the BBC a fortune to cancel the series – actors, crew, writers and like would all have to be paid off twice as much NOT to work on Doctor Who. If Grade simply let them get on with it, all the fuss would end. Like that.

Immediately, Grade agreed to let JST continue Season 23 immediately – keeping on Eric Saward as script editor for 11 episodes of 55 minutes in length – on the condition none of the stories were ever shown or broadcast or even revealed to have been filmed. JST agreed and until 2005 it was assumed that the 'missing' Season 23 had been scrapped in favor of The Mistrial of a Time Lord until BBC Enterprises found five videos waiting to be released under the Doctor Who banner: "The Care-Bear Nightmare Fair", "Messing With Magnus", "The Penultimate Evil", "Revenge of the Autons" and "SlipUp".

These stories were commissioned by Eric Saward via the very complicated method of flipping coins, with old hands to Doctor Who also working with newcomers. The first story, under the working title "I Hope You Get Mauled By A Tiger!" by one of the show's ex-producers, Graham Williams.

Williams left the BBC shortly after setting fire to Doctor Who, when Eric Saward ran him up and suggested he submit a story about Blackpool Pleasure Beach, which JST had decided would be the perfect setting for a serial when Colin Baker, in character, gatecrashed the opening of a new amusement park ride before the police could restrain him. Saward hoped that the producers would clash and, ideally, JST would be involved in a fatal stabbing incident.

Williams decided that the story to feature the character of the Sexual Toymaker after he saw a recovered episode from 1966, The Final Lech. Such was its perversity and disturbing imagery, it would take five viewings and a copy of The Universal Databank before Williams believed the serial was actually a Doctor Who story. The fact he was willing to plagiarize what at the time he believed to be an Australian porn film shows the intense desire for the production crew to get Michael Gough to appear in ridiculously tight leather briefs.

On his own admission, Williams found the job of writing a plot for the Sexual Toymaker ironically somewhat frustrating – the episode he'd watched was just 25 minutes of erotic imagery and talking dirty, so he was forced to plagiarize a script he and Douglas Adams had bullshitted during their last year together, Paris Sucks. Via a selection of cut-and-paste and substituting the characters of the Sixth Doctor, Peri and Sil for the Fourth Doctor, Romana and K9, Williams managed to submit the story in fifteen minutes and also doodled some very graphic diagrams for sexual positions he would enjoy being used in the story.

JST was immediately satisfied with the script, having read the first two sentences, and decided to try and reclaim Veteran film and television performer Michael Gough to reprise his role as the extra-dimensional deviant. Gough however, was far more rich and powerful that the destitute hack employed in 1966 and refused point blank to return to Doctor Who, as he had recently been involved in similar circumstances in 1982's Arc of Sinfinity, set in Amsterdam.

JST persisted, however, forward to the actor a copy of the story outline, a strongly-worded death threat and a copy of 'The Final Lech' retrieved from Australia by way of blackmail. Gough agreed on the stipulation laid down by Grade that this particular serial would never be shown. Similar events persuaded Matthew Robinson to take up the helm as director of the serial.

In one of the most bizarre pieces of casting ever, JST decided that Kevin Stoney (previously starring in The Dustbin Nasty Plan as Magic Chin, The Evasion as Tobias Witherspoon and as Tyrum in Return of the Cybermen) to play the character of Kevin Stoney. However, as the actor was a 67-year old thespian, blind in one eye and normally reserved for Shakespearean villain roles he considered it a bit odd to be cast as 15-year old rough diamond Northerner with 20/20 vision and tendency to hit things. JST insisted it would give the captioner something different to do for the end credits and any TV show starring someone 'as himself' is always bound to get more ratings. Or something.

Filming was done quickly, before the owner of Space Mountain could realize that a much-watched sci-fi serial was about to going round insisting that Blackpool customers would fall prey to an immortal alien pervert. However, sequences on the Big Dipper were filmed live, which accounts for the high level of fluffs, swearing and vomit in the final cut of episode one, now renamed The Nightmare Fair.

During post-production, JST decided that the element of a psychotic electric care bear needed emphasis, forcing Williams to add the name to the title of the story. Just before work finished, JST noticed that Williams had included in the story the return of the sonic screwdriver, previously destroyed in The Visit, written by Saward. Saward himself had allow it to return in order to spark a fight between producers.

Tragically, it didn't work. After pathetic sonic screwdriver substitutes like the sonic lance, the Molenski Univarius, the sonar skeleton key and the sonic dues ex machina, JST decided to just cut the crap and bring back the screwdriver, cautioning writers not to overuse it in the privacy of their own homes.

Work wrapped up on The Care-Bear Nightmare on 2 April 1985, with JST totally confident that the opening story of Season 23 would be brilliant and receive more critical acclaim than all of Season 22 put together, with the brilliant performance of Gough and the return of the sonic screwdriver guaranteeing success – until he was reminded that this season of Doctor Who would never be screened in the 20th century, whereupon he became very quiet and awkward.