Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10
Cast: Sylvester McCoy, Bonnie Langford, Philip Franks, Dillie Keane, Clare Buckfield, Barry McCarthy, Anna Bentinck, Barnaby Edwards.
Shopping is so engrained into the modern human condition that at times it’s possible to believe that we are the products on display. What is actually being bought is not the plastic container with the animal testing free stamp on the side and the various liquids containing soap, shampoo or washing up liquid or even the multi choice boxes of cereal which promise a great start to the day, but us, each and every one of us. We are poked in our brains, defined by what we look at and ultimately put in our baskets, we are the great shopping experiment and there is no let up with the sale.
For the writers of Doctor Who to touch upon this is nothing new but to bring the idea of abhorrent consumerism out as fully into the open as has been done in Mike Tucker’s audio drama The Warehouse.
The seventh incarnation of the Doctor and Mel find themselves trapped in a depository, a warehouse of such unimaginable scale that each aisle is in itself big enough to hold enough provisions that could see a small town glut itself for months without ever running short. However, it is also a warehouse that holds a deep nasty secret, a furtive and sly one that holds what is down on the Earth as a commodity, a biding of time before it can hold humanity up to the scanner and devour it with relish.
In any warehouse there is the chance of vermin getting into the stock room, the odd bit of mould growing in places where the staff overlook the principles of good basic hygiene and in which no matter how many traps are set, how much fungicide sprayed, they still become rampant and can threaten to overrun the space in between.
What Mike Tucker does well in this particular episode is to liken all of this to the human experience, to take humanity to task and offer a mirror up to the world and its wife and suggest that the rate of consumption in the world has not just reached a tipping point but has actually over balanced. We in our own peculiar way have become the mould and the vermin that has swept clean the planet and the trap has been set for us by a higher functioning intelligence.
The Warehouse is not just a story dealing with the science fiction so beloved by the fans of Doctor Who, it is a cautionary tale that suggests that unless we change our ways soon, the very act of consuming will leave us as dust on an empty shelf, that the Earth will rebel and what will be left will only be the start of the downfall of humanity; one that harkens back to the days of superstition and ignorance. The Warehouse is a classic story that would have fit into any of the previous Doctor’s lives but one that is especially suited to Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor’s range of indignation and outrage. Mike Tucker has done extremely well to capture this throughout the story.
The Doctor has no idea what’s in store for him in The Warehouse but the vermin know.
Doctor Who: The Warehouse is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall