Short Trips: Past Tense

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Short Trips: Past Tense

Author
Series	Doctor Who book: Big Finish Short Trips
Release number	6
Publisher	Big Finish Productions
Publication date	April 2004
Pages	242
ISBN	1-84435-046-0
Preceded by	Short Trips: Steel Skies
Followed by	Short Trips: Life Science

Short Trips: Past Tense is a Big Finish original anthology edited by Ian Farrington and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. The collection's theme is history with each story being set before the year 2000.^[1]

List of stories[]

Notes:

• The story CHAOS is former script editor Eric Saward's first Doctor Who-related work since he left the series in 1986.

Bide-a-Wee[]

Bide-a-Wee is the 9th story in the anthology, written by Anthony Keetch, which features the First Doctor and Susan.

Plot[]

The Doctor is relaxing at a B&B named Bide-a-Wee in Keelmouth, 1933, while his granddaughter spends time at the beach—or so it seems until the Atkins family arrives in town. Jeff and his wife Ujwala are taken aback by the locals’ casual racism appalled reactions to the Atkins’ mixed marriage and their son, Craig—but soon, Jeff and Ujwala seem to have grown accustomed to this treatment, and Ujwala has even forgotten that she used to be a brain surgeon, which of course is just silly. The Doctor decides that the time has come to put an end to his vacation, and confronts another of the B&B's residents, Prentice. Prentice admits that he used to roam through time and space, fighting the forces of evil, but that he has since retired to Keelmouth—and, finding it a pleasant and quiet place in which to spend his retirement, he's frozen the community in the year 1933. Outside Keelmouth, it's the year 1999; a flaw in Prentice's technology caused the Atkins family to slip through the cracks, and now they are subconsciously acclimatising to the social standards of 1933. Prentice is reluctant to put an end to his peaceful retirement, but the Doctor convinces young Craig to pretend that he has whooping cough, a disease that can be easily cured in 1999 but is fatal in 1933. Prentice accepts that it's time to put things right, and the Doctor helps him to bring Keelmouth back in synch with the outside world, leaving the Atkins family in their proper time period and returning everyone else to 1933.^[2]

Story chronology[]

The Doctor and Susan are at ease with humanity^{[citation needed]} suggesting that they have had previous encounters. However, the pair have not yet established themselves in 1960's London - placing this story after Frayed and before the first TV episode 100,000 BC^{[citation needed]}

Reception[]

Paul Clarke of the website Whoniverse.net reviewed the short story as "A charming little story that sees the Doctor taking a traditional English holiday. Hartnell's Doctor railing against racism is deeply ironic."^{[3][clarification needed]}

References[]

External links[]

• Big Finish Productions - Short Trips: Past Tense