Short Trips: This Sporting Life (Big Finish)

Written by Una McCormack
Directed by Lisa Bowerman
Sound design and music by Steve Foxon
Cover art by Anthony Lamb
Narrated by Peter Purves
Released by Big Finish Productions on 31 May 2016

I’m not really a football person, and until inspired to do some factchecking by ThisSportingLife, Una McCormack’s new Short Trip for Big Finish, I had only the faintest glimmer of a memory that the World Cup had been stolen when on display in London in March 1966. While This Sporting Life has Steven Taylor dismiss football as an ‘idiotic sport for idiotic people’, Una McCormack’s tale displays her awareness of the power of mythology, of memory and of human kindness, and their role in the layering of the human experience.

Mythology is honoured largely in the juxtaposition of several elements from the lore of Doctor Who and from the popular history of England. Steven arrives sceptical about Dodo’s vaunted ‘swinging city’ and he doesn’t find it, appropriately as this story is set before The War Machines and Doctor Who has not yet started to swing. Similarly Peter Purves’s Lancashire accent is audible here in his narration, his Steven and also his Dodo, a reminder that when Jackie Lane was cast someone thought that to be hip and edgy teenagers still had to dance to the Mersey Beat, or if not sound as if they came from within a few miles of Coronation Street. It's early in 1966, and Dodo shows no awareness that the World Cup will be won by England that year, a victory which became part of a bittersweet legend of misplaced national glory indulged in by some over succeeding decades. Within the context of the story London is superficially still a dusty, fusty city which doesn’t yet boast of its cosmopolitanism.

The title is an irrestistible nod towards the film remembered in Doctor Who histories as the one in which Verity Lambert saw William Hartnell and thought that he was a strong candidate for the part of the Doctor. It’s also an oblique reminder of the initial presentation of the Doctor – a nervous refugee, his presence undisclosed to the authorities of his host world, his granddaughter attending a London school under an identity which doesn’t draw attention to her origins. As far as this story is concerned, the theft of the World Cup is to the benefit of some other refugees who are very anxious to reach their goal, and who bear ready comparison with the Doctor as audiences first knew him.

Employing a character and the actor who played him from the Doctor Who of fifty years ago works very well here. Steven was a man of the future, in some eyes awkwardly placed as the identification figure for the audience of 1966. However, our Space Year 2016 feels a more earthbound one than 1960s audiences might have expected, and Steven can represent our distance from the cultural peculiarities of his and our past. We and Steven are visitors to the environment McCormack builds from elements of 1960s popular fiction, the jobsworth policeman, the solitary goldsmith exiled from pre-war Mitteleuropa, the dark and narrow alleyways of run-down warehouses along the Thames. (It’s a mark of McCormack’s skill that this is conjured up with little use of placenames.) The incidental music complements this, a contemporary sound but with echoes of first and fifth Doctor-era scores.

This all helps fuel the engine of this small but powerful story, which concerns universal values of compassion and how they can, if we choose, overcome the cruelty and cowardice which the Doctor has come to abhor. It’s about being curious but learning to ask the right questions and finding the right answers to them, something at the essence of the Doctor and Doctor Who. Unlike some longer Doctor Who stories, it wears the issue of the Doctor’s involvement in historical events lightly, but in a way which doesn’t trouble the Doctor’s ‘Not one line!’ of The Aztecs very much at all. ThisSportingLife is a happy thirty-five minutes of mystery and resolution which nevertheless makes more than a nod towards facing our own present-day terrors.