Any Suggestions, Doctor? Improv & Doctor Who’s Sci-Fi Charm – OH!CAST

Creating the Improvised Doctor Who Show and Twilight Zone Improv Hosts Cal, John, and Martin welcome James Gamblin and Lou Dunn, the creators of the hit Edinburgh Fringe show, “Any Suggestions, Doctor?“. This is an Improvised Doctor Who Show. The idea started over a pint and eventually became a main feature at the Festival. The team discusses how they deliver a brand new Doctor Who adventure every single night, basing it all on audience suggestions. We also touch upon their other successful project: a completely improvised Twilight Zone show. They discuss the challenge of shifting between these different sci-fi genres on the spot, drawing on the vast canon of the Whoniverse, much like the work of fellow Doctor Who author Una McCormack.

Lo-Fi Sets and the Live Music Secret The Improvised Doctor Who Show deliberately embraces the low-fidelity charm of classic Doctor Who. James and Lou explain their technique, using simple, generic props like blankets and cloths to stand in for giant monsters and alien terrain, encouraging the audience’s imagination. Moreover, one of the show’s unique elements is the use of a live musician. This person scores the entire performance and acts as a secret director by subtly signaling to the improv performers to solve the crisis and save the day. It’s an innovative technique that adds genuine tension to the spontaneous narrative.

Structuring the Story and Audience Navigation Lou and James detail the structure of the show, using long form improv to tell an entire episode’s story over a single hour. They must follow the established beats of a traditional Doctor Who episode, including A, B, and sometimes C plots that must eventually converge. This Doctor Who Improv relies heavily on audience suggestions for the episode’s title, setting, and companion characters. The hosts explain the delicate balance of navigating audience suggestions—including inappropriate topics—while keeping the performance successful, fun, and true to the spirit of the show. The interview concludes by reflecting on the sheer joy and unpredictability of performing a different sci-fi universe every single evening, confirming the strong connection between fandom and improvisational comedy.

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Improvised Doctor Who Show: Full Episode Timestamps

Episode Transcript

Callum Macdonald (00:01.009)
OK, hello and welcome to Ocast, the official podcast of Wokon, the Outer Hebrides Comic Con. I’m your host today, Cal, and it’s great to be back for another show. And I’ll just quickly introduce our guest hosts for tonight. Welcoming back onto the show. Last time he was our guest, this time he’s our co-host. John, how are you doing tonight?

John (00:23.816)
Well, very well, and it’s great to be back.

Callum Macdonald (00:25.907)
All right, and welcome for your first time as a co-host, Martin, what’s happening?

Manny (00:32.101)
I’m ready for this. I’m ready for the action tonight.

Callum Macdonald (00:36.499)
Ready to go, that’s good. So our guests tonight are from the Very Weather From The Hoods Friends show, and I think they tour around the country as well. It’s the Improvised Doctor Who show. Any suggestions, Doctor? And as I understand it, you also do another improvised show, which is more kind of an improvised Twilight show. So welcome into the show, James and Lou, welcome.

James Gamblin (01:04.52)
Hello.

Callum Macdonald (01:06.079)
Hello, great to have you guys on. Well, I suppose just as we always do the warm up question, like what’s your guys background and how did you get involved in this kind of improv theatre stuff?

Lou Dunn (01:20.456)
So both James and I met at the University of York, where we met primarily through the Comedy Society that was there. And as part of their sort of activities that the University Society gets up to, they have an improvised comedy troupe that does what we’d call short form improv, which you probably recognize as sort of the games that we played and things like Whose Lines Are Anyway. So we met through that and basically

Once we finished university, we ended up sort of hanging around still because we were both still living in York and then we realized it’d be quite fun to keep doing improvised comedy because we spent so many years learning how to do it really well.

Callum Macdonald (02:00.071)
Yeah.

James Gamblin (02:04.102)
apparently we just can’t let go.

Callum Macdonald (02:04.19)
Yeah, and…

And also, I’m guessing like from the obvious, the main topic of this show, yous are both big Doctor Who fans and was it just a happy melding of that passion with the improv that led you to this?

Lou Dunn (02:07.276)
No, definitely not.

James Gamblin (02:23.118)
I think when we were doing short form at university, we always thought that Doctor Who was a fantastic backdrop for improv, because you know you can go anywhere at any time. But the show itself came out of, as most great ideas often do, came over a pint at the pub. We were all sort of, I think it was one of the Capaldi episodes that just aired that we’d all watched and gone, well, we could all write something like that.

hell, could all probably improvise something like that. Wait a minute. And from there, it sort of, it was born really.

Lou Dunn (02:55.132)
Hahaha

Callum Macdonald (03:00.297)
All right, going from there, then, so you’ve got the idea. So how do you actually get it from that idea to the stage? Like what was the process there?

Lou Dunn (03:11.092)
gosh, so initially we met up with the intention of going like, right, we want to do an improvised comedy show. want to take it to the original plan was to go to the Edinburgh Fringe and do the free Fringe because we were sort of going, there’s a group of us here. We’ve all done the Fringe before through the university. So we’d all had some experience of what it’s like to go up there, you know, produce a show, book accommodation. And so was like, okay, so the goal is to get to the Edinburgh Fringe. So we started rehearsing. I took on the mantle of producing.

which is a great role to take on if you love lots of additional work, none of which is actually getting to do the show. But like, so from, and I remember very distinctly, so we’re trying to get a venue and I’m trying to go through the free fringe and they’ve not gotten back to me yet. I’m slightly worried because it’s, originally the show was just five cast members, but that still requires a relatively big stage to do anything on, otherwise we’re all going to be trapped. So I’m desperately going to, I’m really worried they’re going to put us in some corner of a

and we’re not going to be able to make it work. And then I’m on holiday with Louise, who’s also in the troupe. We’re at Disneyland Paris. And she holds up Twitter to me and goes, there’s this venue in Edinburgh that says they’re still looking for a show. You should let them know. That venue was called Sweet Venues, which I don’t think exists in Edinburgh anymore, but I think still does stuff in Glasgow and possibly Brighton. I don’t know they’re still in Brighton or not.

But basically they’re saying, like, we’ve got shows, anyone want to apply? And I go, yeah, send them an email going, look, we don’t have the budget to do a paid Fringe show. We were going to do free Fringe. But can we work out a deal where we pay you at the end of the Fringe? It’s absolute masterstroke of luck that the person I’m emailing who is responsible for booking this goes, I am an enormous Doctor Who fan. I

the loot you want to put on your show. So now we’ve gone from, we’re going to do the free fringe to, no, we’re doing a paid fringe show now where people are going to pay money to see us. And also they’ve given us the largest room in the venue. So it was, it’s, it’s a combination of dumb luck that we saw that, but also the fact that we, came up with a show and said, we want to do this show and enough people over the years have gone, great idea for a show. Absolutely. should do that.

Manny (05:06.485)
awesome

Callum Macdonald (05:20.021)
Yeah, because I suppose like what some people are thinking, you know, Doctor Who, or you need special effects and all, but then I suppose the thing that you show is you can actually just take the mickey out of the old cardboard sets and all that easily, can’t you?

James Gamblin (05:34.714)
Yeah, definitely. mean, when we first started, was definitely, I think the phrase we were using amongst ourselves was kids with a toy box. Kind of, kind of aesthetic to the whole thing. But there is that, it’s very fortuitous that that can sort of play into sort of a very loving pastiche of wobbly sets and using plungers and whisks to be Daleks and rubber gloves and wigs and all sorts that mean that

John (05:58.386)
Yes.

James Gamblin (06:04.844)
It all sort of buys into that element of the lo-fi element of what Doctor Who always was and to a certain extent always has been.

Callum Macdonald (06:12.841)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lou Dunn (06:14.742)
Yeah, and it’s been really interesting because every so often we’ll go, well, we need to the ante now. We need to make it more serious. the first big upgrade we did was, right, we’re to add music. We want to have a radiophonic work. We an amazing guy called Alex Rushworth who basically did the sound design for the show and designed this amazing system that we passed on to other musicians now of him, like, based on all these stems and incredible things. But then that happened and we all went…

no, the shows actually can be quite atmospheric and cool. Like how Dr. Who can be quite atmospheric and cool. Right, now we have to get a set. Right, now we need a bit of smoke. Right, now we need to get the lighting design. It started off with, yeah, it’s cardboard sets, no one cares. And now we’re also like how the PPC has had the same map as Dr. Who. We’re like, we need Disney money. We need Disney money to make the show be the proper thing now.

James Gamblin (06:59.28)
So if anyone from Disney is listening, we’re open to investment.

Manny (07:01.927)
Ha ha ha.

Lou Dunn (07:03.298)
I hear there’s a hiatus going on, I don’t know.

James Gamblin (07:05.25)
no.

John (07:06.216)
Thanks.

Callum Macdonald (07:06.485)
yeah, we can absolutely guarantee Disney listen to us. We’re very influential. How do we John? I think John, yeah, we’ve got massive reach in the Hebrides.

Lou Dunn (07:11.466)
Hahaha

James Gamblin (07:12.634)
Ha ha!

John (07:13.67)
Absolutely.

Manny (07:18.635)
If you’re going to do an animated version, yeah, definitely.

Lou Dunn (07:22.157)
You

James Gamblin (07:22.982)
You

Callum Macdonald (07:24.829)
And so like, is there a general formula you kind of hang the show around? Like is there like a loose structure and then you’re just taking the improvs? Can you just kind of guide us through like how do you structure each show?

Lou Dunn (07:37.91)
Right, so the structure of the show is an episode of Doctor Who. So I know that sounds reasonably flippant, like what, because this is, so the kind of improv comedy that we’re doing when we do the show is known as long form improv, which is essentially, we’re gonna tell a story over an hour. And there are loads and loads of different formats that exist. And they’ve all got weird code names, like one’s called an Armando, one’s called a Harold.

Callum Macdonald (07:43.167)
Yeah.

Lou Dunn (08:04.958)
And they were all like, you pick up an improv manual and you can learn how to do these particular styles. And what we did was we looked at all of these, we sort of rehearsed with a bunch of them and we went, none of these feel like an episode of Doctor Who. And so what we then did was we sat down with a whiteboard and I should say our director, Charles, basically did this. He sat down with a whiteboard and went, right, what is the structure of an episode of Doctor Who? And we went through it of like, you know, they arrive in the place, they meet certain characters, we’ll cut away to a villain, we’ll cut away back to some side characters.

And we sort of go, there’s an A plot, there’s a B plot. And sometimes if it’s going really well, there’s a C plot. And the plan is basically, we have to establish all of these plots. And then ideally at the end, they will all come together. So like the ideal version of this show is the B plot solves the A plot and like things that we referenced early in the show will loop in. But what I must stress, and I know this sounds like an insane thing to say, but we have to say it so often, mostly to our families who come and see the show. Yes, we do make it up.

Yes, the whole thing is made up. No, we didn’t plan anything in advance. No, it doesn’t always go like that. And we have had some episodes that were completely mad because we went in with the intention of doing that structure. And then by like 20 minutes in, like, well, we can’t do that structure now because it seems to have gone insane.

Callum Macdonald (09:25.973)
So John, Martin, do you want to step in here?

Manny (09:29.118)
I seriously thought you going to say, you always have to say, don’t try this at home.

Lou Dunn (09:34.99)
Try it at home. We don’t mind. You’ll be bad at it, but try it.

James Gamblin (09:39.578)
Hahaha

Manny (09:43.282)
No, I do love-

Callum Macdonald (09:43.66)
John? sorry, sorry Martin.

Manny (09:46.569)
I love the fact that when you’re talking about the special effects, how they would be so simple because when you watch Doctor Who, as a child watching Doctor Who, I remember being absolutely terrified of a thing around the same time as the Cybermen was a planet with the giant maggots and the giant maggots appeared out of a kind of coal miners yard of mist and dirty gritty

Lou Dunn (10:07.223)
Manny (10:16.219)
earth and you had to walk along certain bits of the the ground and if you made too much of a footfall a giant maggot about two foot long appeared and launched itself around your neck and then when I watched out of nostalgia I watched that that same episode many years later and it was so obvious that the doctor I can’t remember which one it was I think it was was Sean Pertwee I think.

Lou Dunn (10:38.414)
Thank

Manny (10:46.007)
Anyway, he was grabbing this toy plastic maggot and you know that whole thing of pulling it onto yourself and pretending that it’s attacking you. And it was so clear and ridiculous that I was laughing as an adult. But when you say, OK, you’re trying to do props, where are you going to find a two foot long maggot? Even if you do have to hold it onto yourself, come on.

Lou Dunn (10:54.281)
Yeah

Lou Dunn (11:18.178)
All the-

James Gamblin (11:18.476)
I think when I meant sort of kids with a toy box, that really is kind of the ethos with which we approach doing a lot of the props. A lot of the things we have are so incredibly generic and like our suitcase of props is full of things like various hats or cloths or bits of cushion and things like that. so much of, you’d be surprised how on board an audience gets when you

Lou Dunn (11:33.505)
Mm.

Callum Macdonald (11:39.519)
Yeah. Yeah.

James Gamblin (11:48.356)
you know, if it’s the case of a two foot maggot, how on board an audience is with a bold up blanket or piece of cloth, and sort of really throwing yourselves behind the, is a two foot maggot. And that’s part of the, guess, why this format works so well as improv as well is because everyone in the room wants it to succeed as well. Everyone in the room is bought into the world because everyone’s helped create it, whether it’s through the suggestions or

Lou Dunn (11:55.596)
Yeah.

James Gamblin (12:18.086)
Just audience laughing at certain jokes or gasping at certain bits. Everyone is bought into the idea that yeah, that blanket is an absolutely terrifying two-foot maggot that’s trying to kill the doctor right now.

Lou Dunn (12:30.35)
It’s also the fun of we’re basically turning up on a stage and going, we’re going to do something that’s completely impossible. We’re going to make up an episode of Doctor Who and we’ve got a box of blankets and cloth props and we can turn it into any monster. And so everyone just has to buy in on the fact that, yeah, what we’ve just said we’re going to do is impossible. So every time we even get remotely close to something that even is slightly like what they asked for, they’ll be like, amazing. You’ve just done something impossible. It’s kind of like doing a magic trick.

Manny (13:02.895)
Kudos to you for doing that. you’re talking of doing the improv and so much of it, you’re asking the audience to buy in and there are willing audience. And I’ll come back to that later to ask you if you’ve ever had an unwilling audience, especially at something like The Fringe. But when you’re doing so much improv, I’m not plugging this. I haven’t been paid by Amazon. But have you seen the recent movie, the recent movie Deep Cover?

Lou Dunn (13:27.553)
You

Manny (13:30.615)
We’re Brace Hat, Dallas Howard and Paddy Considine, Improv Actors.

Lou Dunn (13:38.226)
I haven’t, it’s on my list, I’ve seen the trailer. I know I should watch it because obviously I’m gonna get all the in-jokes, but.

Manny (13:41.593)
OK, you should. You should definitely watch it. It’s it’s you know, it’s very it’s very funny. But I also have to ask you now when people go to like, say a comic on, for instance, and there’s guest lecturers there that we recognize people from our show and they’re telling us all about about things. Sometimes the thing they’re doing is still not their day job. So.

Is this your day job or do you have to do something else and this is your passion?

Lou Dunn (14:18.072)
So it’s definitely not our day job at the moment, I would say. It’s definitely something that we do because we love it and we invest in because we love it. It’s not to say it hasn’t ever made us no money, but it’s also definitely to say that any money we have made has immediately gone back into the show. So, but you know, this is it as well. It’s like even within this trip. like Louise is also in the trip runs workshops.

to teach, improvise, comment in things. so it’s definitely a skill that we use both with the show and outside of the show. But it is a passion project. It is something we’re doing because we love doing it.

Manny (14:56.354)
That’s fantastic and of course, one of the best reasons and the best results come from that because sometimes when you’re a paid job, I’m not casting any aspersions from when I used to paid jobs, but sometimes your heart isn’t in it as much as you would like it to be, but your heart is obviously in it for the passion for the any suggestions, doctor. Now, can I come back to the question?

Callum Macdonald (14:56.553)
Right?

Lou Dunn (15:11.509)
Okay.

Manny (15:23.349)
Did you ever have any unwilling audiences, especially with the image that the French has sometimes of being a hard sell or hard to perform at?

James Gamblin (15:37.52)
think with The Fringe, one of the delights of doing this show at The Fringe is it’s such a quick and, I guess, easy to get across the idea of what the show is. We’re not trying to sell a stand-up show or a sketch show. We are going, improvise Doctor Who. And that’s either something that someone wants to spend money on or doesn’t. But that being said, given that The Fringe audiences are often made up of groups of people, one of the questions we always start at

Lou Dunn (15:57.646)
Mm.

James Gamblin (16:06.63)
I always ask at the top of every show is give me a big cheer if you’re a massive fan of Doctor Who and a reasonable portion of the audience will give a cheer. And then we also ask give me a cheer if you’ve been dragged along by a friend or a loved one. And that also usually gets a bit of a bit of a cheer. So there’s, there’s always a split in the audience between, I guess, the diehard Doctor Who fans and those who are either taking a punt or have been brought along by someone. But I would never say that we’ve had like

Manny (16:19.445)
Yeah.

James Gamblin (16:35.716)
mean, correct me if you have a different memory to me, Lou, and that’s entirely possible. I don’t think we’ve ever had an audience that is sort of entirely unwilling. We’ve had some that are very invested in the Doctor Who side of things and some that are very interested in the improv and the comedy side of things. But everyone’s there to enjoy it. And we try and structure a lot of the show and a lot of the plots as well that there’s enough there if you’re a diehard Doctor Who fan to get…

Lou Dunn (16:38.375)
Hehehehe

Lou Dunn (16:43.288)
Hmm.

James Gamblin (17:03.32)
a couple of knowing winks or references here and there. But there’s also enough that if you know absolutely nothing about Doctor Who, we can tell you what you need to know. It’s an alien who travels through space and time. They fight monsters. They’re generally good egg. Let’s have fun for an hour. And those people seem to get a lot out of it as well.

Lou Dunn (17:18.209)
Yeah.

And we steal so many of the narrative devices from the show. Because Doctor Who is a show that is structured in such a way that, in theory, you can join it at the start of any season and it should make sense. So the fact that the Doctor changes their face all the time, we don’t have a consistent Doctor. So there’s no continuity in this show. The fact that the companion that we will have in an episode whenever we do it is not a companion from the show, it will be someone new. So even if we do meet, sometimes, like I remember we’ve had episodes where like Amy and Rory

were brought back into the plot and were explicitly requested by the audience. But we had a companion there, so we could go, Samantha, this is Amy. Amy and I used to travel together. Everything’s couched in the same tricks. With regards to hostile audiences, never actively hostile. Never had an audience that turned up and hated it, thankfully. But something that does happen quite a lot, and it’s something we’ve had to put a real like.

Kabosh on his will be like, where do you want to go anywhere in space and time? I remember one time we got two teenage kids who went like, New York, September, 2001. And we’re like, listen to your little shit. So there are times we have to quash certain suggestions because we’re like, this is a family show. We don’t want to do Donald Trump, actually. It won’t be particularly fun if you make us do that. Sometimes we have been cornered into it. Sometimes people have been like, we want to go to the Trump’s White House. And we’re like, fine.

Callum Macdonald (18:26.261)
Mmm.

Manny (18:26.91)
Yeah.

Lou Dunn (18:43.436)
You’re gonna get the Trump impression, it’s gonna be awkward at points because sometimes it’s-

Callum Macdonald (18:47.356)
Hahaha

James Gamblin (18:49.222)
And one of the things that we’ve often found helps as well is sort of when we’re asking for suggestions of anywhere in space and time, just reminding the audience that they’ve paid to be here and just sit through it for an hour. So if they want to sit through this for an hour, we can do it, but you might not enjoy it as much as if we went to the last pub on Saturn.

Lou Dunn (19:01.164)
Yes, true.

Yeah.

Lou Dunn (19:10.808)
Hmm.

Manny (19:11.182)
Okay, I’ve got loads more questions but I want to let John have a chance to speak in case being calm, hog the whole shoe.

Callum Macdonald (19:13.183)
So what’s the…

Callum Macdonald (19:21.493)
All right, and enter Joan.

John (19:22.424)
Yeah, sure. You can’t see us, and this may not come as a surprise, but I will sensationally reveal that myself and Martin are of a certain vintage, and probably have clear memories of old Who rather than the current Who. Do you draw on the entire spectrum of Who from 60 whatever it was to the present day, or do you…

Lou Dunn (19:35.778)
Mm-hmm.

John (19:49.734)
Taylor at all, so you take a look at the odds and think, we’re to go full 1978 on this lot.

Lou Dunn (19:55.99)
Yeah, definitely 1978. That’s definitely the one that the audience is most, most keen into. No, it’s, it’s, it is. So there’s one member of the troupe, Harry, who absolutely grew up with Doctor Who with all the old serials. And so what can occasionally happen in the show is sometimes someone will shout out a suggestion like the Zarbie and we’ll go great the Zarbie off we go and we’ll go backstage and we’ll look at Harry and go which one’s the Zarbie? What are they? He’s a big mouth. Oh, okay, I think he’s a big mouth.

The structure of the show is definitely modern, who? Like it’s definitely based around that 40 minute, 45 minutes sort of pacing. But we will reference the old show. We will bring in old stuff. And there’s definitely like, because each of us plays the doctor in a different way, each of us has a different like base, but for like, I know James, you like to play a slightly more professory sort of old school style.

James Gamblin (20:45.83)
Yeah, I sort of tend to be sort of halfway between a sort of stuffy, like a William Hartnell come Peter Capaldi professor type with a touch of mania, whereas, yeah, sorry, I interrupted you, carry on, I just wanted to say my piece.

Lou Dunn (21:01.76)
No, no, yeah, it’s so, it’s definitely an influence, but I think realistically, I mean, could you imagine if we tried to do a full 1960s, 70s style serial on a stage? It would be hours and there’d be so many like mind establishing shots. And so it’s sort of trying to hit the sweet spot of we want to make it feel modern, we want to make it feel fresh, but absolutely we’ll pull K9 in, absolutely we’ll pull in, you know.

If someone asks for the Salamander or Frobisher or something, we’ll do it, absolutely. But we’ll also make sure we tell the audience, this is Frobisher, he’s a penguin right now, but he’s a shapeshifter, he’s mostly from the comics.

John (21:44.881)
Yes.

James Gamblin (21:46.438)
Yeah, like we’ve brought K9 in. We brought the Toymaker back before Modern Who did. We brought the Rani back before Modern Who did. Like we’re definitely not shying away from it. But there’s also no escaping the fact that, you know, we all grew up with the exception of Harry who got there first, I guess, with the sort of the 2005 and up till now era of Doctor Who.

But we definitely try and draw on it all and there’s definitely, we’ll get suggestions as to locations or episode titles, but definitely give us a steer maybe in one direction or the other.

John (22:30.45)
The other thing I was interested in was your live score. Do you actually work with a musician live on stage or is it a really good sound engineer who’s throwing in the appropriate clip at the appropriate time?

Lou Dunn (22:45.666)
This is one of the fun things about the show. So there is a live musician. At the moment, the show’s main musician is a guy called Nick, who will operate a drum machine. He’ll operate a particular synth pad that’s been developed, which has loads of stems of some of the more famous loops from Doctor Who. So things like Doomsday’s in that loop and I Am the Doctor’s in that loop. And like it’s all the stems. And the brilliant thing about that is he can like bring it in and increase the tempo and increase the volume in particular ways and like…

bring certain instruments in and pull them away. But he will also have a live keyboard in front of him that he will be scoring along with. And that’s the majority of it. He’ll only really bring in those themes when like, say the master turns up, the master’s theme is gonna pop up on that thing. Or I think one of the, if you want a bit of backstage knowledge on this, if you’re ever in a show and you’re thinking, oh, it’s getting like, about 50 minutes in, they need to wrap this up. And you hear, am the doctor. That is the musician telling us you need to save the day now. So.

Manny (23:41.763)
haha

Lou Dunn (23:45.358)
It’s fun. like that, like so Nick’s the current musician and he’s worked a lot on it and he’s developed his own sound score and stuff. But the original musician, Alex, he created this incredible radio phonic live radio phonic workshop and was operating with like both electric guitars and keyboards and like synthesized his voice live and stuff. it was, you know, if honestly it’s worth watching the musician during our shows as well, because they do incredible stuff.

next to us while we’re performing and they absolutely are part of the improv, they absolutely guide where we’re going.

John (24:17.544)
It’s a two-way

Lou Dunn (24:20.471)
Yeah.

Lou Dunn (24:24.47)
Yeah, something that can happen quite a lot is, you know, we might be doing a scene in the music. So say, say a lighthearted scene, the musician might start playing lighthearted music and sort of getting us to, you know, sort of all these two characters meet for the first time and it’s fun. And then we’ll cut to the next scene and the musician will just go, right, heavy drums. And we’ll go, right, this is now an action scene. This is now a scene in which stuff has to happen because in a way they have the advantage of they are watching us and they can go, right, we need to change the pace. We need to, we need to make the next scene, you know.

they can see which characters are coming on and it was like last time we saw you, you were in this position so I’m gonna dictate now that this scene goes in this particular direction. So it’s really fun and it’s a difficult, I can’t imagine how hard it is for them but for us it’s almost subconscious. It’s just you’re on stage and there’s heavy drums, immediately your body goes into like tense mode and you just start performing with that influence.

Callum Macdonald (25:16.925)
Yeah, just to, I think we briefly discussed this before we went on air, but you know, I’ve seen some other improv shows, so like, how do you get the ideas from the audience and all that? So I think it’s like what we discussed before we just kind of started recording.

James Gamblin (25:34.241)
So with our show there are three big decisions that need to be made at the top of the show basically. The first is who’s going to play the doctor and for that we use one of the most finely tuned scientific instruments in the universe which is a big blue dice that we get a small child or the closest allegory to a small child in the audience we can find to roll for us.

Callum Macdonald (25:37.845)
Yeah.

James Gamblin (25:59.302)
The second is where the episode is going to be set, so anywhere in time and space, so past, future, in outer space, a historical period, something made up, whatever. And we’ve had all sorts. We’ve had The Last Pub on Saturn. A personal favourite was The Source Minds of Hinds 57, The Hindenburg 2, because apparently that needed a sequel. And for that we just get audience members to stick their hands up and whoever is

Manny (26:19.092)
Yeah.

Lou Dunn (26:22.347)
You

James Gamblin (26:29.222)
fronting the show at the start and that’s something we rotate amongst ourselves. We’ll pick a few and then the audience will decide out of those three or four which one they want to go to via the volume of their cheers and that’s how we decide that. And then the final part is as audience members are coming in we’ll be handing them slips of paper and pens and we just get them to write down, make up an episode title. It be absolutely anything but something you think will be a really great

title for an episode of Doctor Who and we’ll pick one of those at random out of a hat at the top of the show. And much like in, and this is a line that we use as well, but much like actual Doctor Who, quite often the episode title and the episode setting seemingly have very little to do with one another. And it’s our job to sort of, occasionally the stars align and it will be absolutely perfect, brilliant synergy between the…

suggested setting and the suggested title, usually because accidentally it’s the same person that gave both. But it’s our job during the show to of try and tie those two very disparate things together. But ultimately we get those three suggestions and we’re off basically for an hour. The audience is there with us and we’ve got an hour to try and explore both of those ideas and bring them together.

Lou Dunn (27:40.942)
Mm.

Callum Macdonald (27:52.266)
So have you just ever had the two suggestions where you were just like, no, I want Earth. Like has there ever been one that’s just been so extreme you’re just like, how are ever going to make this match that?

Lou Dunn (27:57.326)
What what

Lou Dunn (28:04.64)
One of the most difficult things that happens quite a lot is people will write a title like it’s a Harry Potter book. So it will be, Doctor Who meets Mr. Bump. And you’re there going like, well, we’re definitely meeting Mr. Bump. But unfortunately, this is set in Lidl. So I guess somehow we’ve got to make Mr. Bump real in Lidl and then we’ll work from there.

And then I will admit, like, this is definitely early on and something hopefully we’re not as bad at. There were some occasions where we’d come off and we’d go, that was great. What was the title of that episode? I can’t remember.

James Gamblin (28:30.608)
Another

John (28:39.954)
Thanks.

James Gamblin (28:41.67)
We just didn’t reference it at all by mistake. One of the other things we get quite less so now, but we have definitely gone through a run of getting is a lot of crossover type things. People really wanting the Doctor to meet these other characters from fiction, which early on we sort of tried to tackle. And we still do try to tackle when it makes sense, but we profess to be Doctor Who experts. We don’t necessarily profess to be Lord of the Rings experts. And occasionally when the stars align in the

Lou Dunn (28:43.638)
Yeah, yeah.

James Gamblin (29:10.422)
opposite way as when the title and the setting match up, we’ll get a setting that references a crossover and title that references a crossover. We had an episode, think, what was it? It’ll have been about six or seven years ago, that the episode title was called Doctor Who Meets James Bond, and it was set at Jurassic Park. So we had to draw on knowledge of three distinct IPs and somehow bring them all together. I can’t remember how successful it was.

John (29:29.416)
you

Lou Dunn (29:30.158)
You

James Gamblin (29:40.004)
It’s always a challenge and I’ll leave it there.

Lou Dunn (29:41.885)
Yeah, yeah, I think we have one that was set on like the USS Enterprise and it was the Doctor Meets Obi-Wan. And I’m like, I understand that all of these three things are kind of similar, but they’re also distinct enough that it’s gonna be really hard to make sure they don’t massively contradict each other. Yeah, no, that’s it. One of the things actually that is quite fun. So that’s how we currently get suggestions. In particular,

we currently select the doctor by rolling a big dice. That isn’t how we used to do it. What we used to do was, what would usually be is it would be one of us would be fronting the show, so hosting the show basically. So they couldn’t be the doctor. But what they’d do is they’d line up the other performers and each, they’d ask the performers a question like, you know, what’s your favorite thing you’ve done today? And each performer would have to step forward and say a funny line. And then after that, we’d get the audience to vote for who was their favorite. And we stopped doing this.

James Gamblin (30:15.095)
yeah.

Lou Dunn (30:39.15)
because Matt, one of the members of the cast, is too charismatic. And so they kept being chosen to be the Doctor over and over again, which was frustrating for all of us and deeply exhausting for them. Because it’s like day four of them having to be the Doctor and they’re like, it’s actually very hard to carry the plot every single day. So we changed the dice to try and make it more random and fair. And then the last time we did the Ennumbah Fringe,

Callum Macdonald (30:53.65)
Yeah

Lou Dunn (31:09.074)
I got up every single time and the dice did not select me once. For the entire month I was not selected to be the doctor. So randomness doesn’t always work.

Callum Macdonald (31:17.522)
wow.

Manny (31:23.853)
Is it all male doctors or do you have a Judy Foster stand and a Judy Whitaker stand in there somewhere?

Callum Macdonald (31:24.254)
John (31:24.456)
Thank you.

Lou Dunn (31:32.942)
Jodie Foster standing would be amazing. No, we do. Yeah, she’s more than welcome, definitely. No. So right from the off, had Louise was in the cast. Louise is part of it. She was playing the doctor long before they were ever saying they were going to cast a woman as the doctor. So she picked Jodie by a couple of years, I think. But we’ve also had other performers over the years come in as well.

Manny (31:35.689)
I’m human.

Callum Macdonald (31:35.957)
Yeah.

James Gamblin (31:37.422)
Yeah, if Jodie Foster wants to join the cast, they’re more than welcome.

Callum Macdonald (31:40.213)
Yeah, well, that’s official. It’s definitely going to happen.

Manny (31:42.819)
Yeah, woo, contact.

Manny (31:48.92)
Okay.

Lou Dunn (32:03.287)
think of their name. So Emily’s come in and done a few shows. We had a performer called Charlotte who did some shows of us. So we do have a mixed cast and also the cast itself is fairly diverse in terms of I’m sort of gender fluid non-binary. So yeah, so there’s lots of lots of identities milling around in there. But it was interesting when one thing that’s really interesting is when Louise was playing the doctor for the first time, she would absolutely milk the fact that my god, I’ve turned into a woman for the first time would have a lot of fun with that.

to extent where when we were watching Jodie doing it, I’m like, what are doing? You’re the first female to have some fun with this, play with this some more. Jodie’s doctor is very genderless. I think deliberately so. I think they didn’t want to draw attention to it, but it kind of felt like they were missing a trick there.

Manny (32:37.644)
Yeah.

John (32:39.634)
Yeah.

Callum Macdonald (32:48.437)
When we get Jodie on we’ll pass on the criticisms. So how many are there in the group right now?

Lou Dunn (32:51.999)
Hahaha

Lou Dunn (33:04.406)
So there’s sort of what I’m gonna call six permanent members, six members of the company. So there’s myself, there’s James, there’s Louise, there’s Matt, there’s Charles, and there’s Harry, and there’s Harry as well. We do bring in other performers. So there’s another performer called Zack, who we know who does improv comedy as well. He runs another show called The Silly Ant, which is improvised myths and legends. And we’ve been known to swap cast members when each of us needs help.

getting up a full cast. But yeah, we’ve had other performers in come and go and of ringers, we sort of the idea of people we sort of call on when we need help and people who’ve generously stepped up to the plate to do things. But what we found is that we did go for a period of trying to recruit more people. And it’s quite difficult already to organize six people who are spread across the country. Turns out adding more people made it even more difficult. So

It’s a flexible troupe, there’s a core six of us really. And then we have the musicians. So Nick’s our current sort of main musician, but we’ve also worked with a comedian called Bennett Kavanagh, who’s a musical comedian in his own right, but we’ve called upon him to help us out with shows as well, doing music. Have I missed anyone, James?

James Gamblin (34:23.107)
think so but

when they listen to this, they can take it up with us privately when we’ve forgotten to mention them.

Lou Dunn (34:28.258)
They can come furiously to us,

Callum Macdonald (34:32.981)
So I was just going to ask you, you’ve kind of hit briefly on your, but can you just give us a rundown of what each of the six, how their doctors differ? Like a quick rundown.

Lou Dunn (34:41.734)
right. Okay. Well, this is fun because sometimes we also mix it up in ourselves.

Callum Macdonald (34:46.972)
All right.

James Gamblin (34:47.11)
was going to say, like, bearing in mind that there’s a certain amount of variability even for each of us.

Callum Macdonald (34:52.969)
Okay.

Lou Dunn (34:54.168)
So the thing that I find quite interesting is if you look at what a lot of actors say when they play the Doctor is that there is definitely a character that is the Doctor. They’ve always got to be curious about what’s going on. They’re always an inherently, to some degree, nerdy character. They’re always trying to just, it’s not just that they’ve met an alien, they’ve met a fascinating alien. And they’re always going to try and help people. There’s always an element of heroism, even if it’s sometimes buried under some darker stuff like with Peter Capaldi.

But really what happens is you end up pulling up elements of yourself that sort of come to meet those ideas. So my doctor is quite manic, quite runny-roundy, quite all over the shop, loves a mystery. Like one of my favorite things to do during a show will be like, well, I’ve established a mystery and the companion will go, what’s going on? And I’ll turn to them with a big beaming smile and go, I don’t have a clue. I’ve never seen this before. This is great.

But my doctor is also the one that frequently regenerates the most. I love to end an episode with a big sacrifice. So I’ve got some of that David Tennant melodrama going through me, definitely. But yeah, and then James, got to slightly, we discussed it as something more professory take.

James Gamblin (36:04.88)
Yeah, like mine is very much in the vein of, and I don’t know where this has come from because I genuinely don’t think this is an awful lot like my real character. Real character? Makes it sound like I’m playing someone. But it has an element of of the William Hartnell and I guess Peter Capaldi sort of gruff professor vibe. But I’ve also taken, I think subconsciously quite a lot from Paul McGann’s Doctor.

Lou Dunn (36:17.068)
Hahaha

Lou Dunn (36:33.998)
Mm.

James Gamblin (36:34.166)
less so from the TV movie, but a lot of what he’s brought to the character through the big Finnish audio dramas and things like that. So a lot of, guess, he’s a bit of a dandy, but very, I think, doesn’t suffer fools gladly and very intellectually curious. I think what’s interesting about all of the Doctors is, Luke touched on it, they’ve all got these core characteristics.

Lou Dunn (36:55.596)
Hmm.

James Gamblin (37:01.582)
I almost like to think about the Doctor’s character as kind of like an EQ, a mixing board. There are these individual traits that pop up. They’re very clever and they know it. There’s a certain amount of heroism, there’s a amount of humor, there’s a certain amount of ego. And with every generation, that sort of gets put on shuffle. And some of those get dialed up to 11 and some of them get dialed right down. They’re all still there. Which I think as a cast, we generally…

bring quite well. I know that Matt and Harry’s doctors tend to be a lot more than certainly either mine or Lou’s just because we’ve covered them a lot more. I guess silly is not quite the word I’m reaching for but a lot more. Silly is the closest thing I can think of.

Lou Dunn (37:52.056)
think silly’s not a bad call for it.

Callum Macdonald (37:52.635)
Are they the of, are they the timey-wimey ones?

Manny (37:54.472)
Flippant? Flippant?

James Gamblin (37:54.659)
Yeah.

Lou Dunn (37:58.99)
I think the most timely one is James. James is, you want techno babble, if you want a scientific, genuinely the thing that James can do that I think is the most impressive thing that the rest of us can’t even hold a candle to is we could weave some absolutely absurd web and James will figure out a way to actually make it sci-fi, actually bring it back to a scientific idea. I think we had one episode was an infinite Ikea.

James Gamblin (38:21.156)
Yeah, I was just about say the Infinite IKEA. I was so thrilled with this. And we’ve gone off the topic of what everyone else’s doctors are, but it’s only me and Lou’s out here, so we can talk about what we want. But was this, an Infinite IKEA, and there was, somehow, and Rassilon was the villain, president of Gallifrey. I can’t remember how, but he was, what we ended up bringing it back to was he was using flat-packed furniture.

Lou Dunn (38:28.568)
We’ll get back to it. We’ll get back to it.

James Gamblin (38:50.008)
in the same way that you… and folding it up in the same way that you might fold pocket universes and dimensions and stepping through from one universe to another like a Mobius strip or a Klein bottle because that’s how it’s space for… or something like that. And that’s what being a formally trained theoretical physicist will do for your improv career.

Lou Dunn (39:01.603)
Yeah.

Lou Dunn (39:12.3)
Yeah, and it’s just an absolute wonder to behold. And this is the thing as well as like, that’s definitely one of James’s biggest strengths there. One of the things that I think I love to do is, certainly as the doctor, is I love, as we’re going through the episode, I will try and clock every little thing that hasn’t had an answer yet. So that by the time I get to the finale, I’m like, right, I’ve got all these ropes, all these different threads. I’m going to tie this together.

I’m going to make sense of everything that’s happened. Even if I have to stand here for like three minutes and monologue to get there, I am going to tie everything together. But yeah, but like Harry’s Harry’s Doctor I think is quite fun because one thing to remember is this is a parody show. So like James and I have fun sort of basically doing our best version of the Doctor. But then I think Harry, Harry and Charles in particular definitely play up to the parody. Harry’s Doctor can be very easily like panicked.

in a way that’s very funny, in a way that’s sort of like, in almost like doesn’t necessarily contradict the character of the Doctor, but you’re almost there being like, my god, he’s saving the day and he’s just about getting away with it. He doesn’t seem to quite know what he’s doing, but he’s managed to pull it off. And then by complete counter, you’ve got Charles who loves to play the Doctor as an oblivious buffoon. And almost all of the rest of us have to make it so that he saves the day almost like sort of almost Mr. Magoo style almost like just just just

James Gamblin (40:31.782)
Almost like in spite of himself he manages to save the day.

Lou Dunn (40:33.582)
Yes, yeah. Like his character will very deliberately and sometimes like, from the perspective of the performers, obnoxiously ignore the incredibly obvious hint we’ve given him that like, this person is the master. And they’re like, ah, good to see you, the captain. And you’re definitely the captain and no one else. And we’re like, how obvious would we have to make this before Charles eventually caves? Yeah.

Callum Macdonald (40:44.585)
Yeah.

John (41:01.064)
How do you keep control of the plot once you’ve started and set it off running? Do you have touch points?

Lou Dunn (41:09.496)
Good question, I don’t know. Yeah, just, it just, you have to roll with it.

James Gamblin (41:10.387)
Once you find out, let us know.

It’s one of the delights of improv. It’s a cliche, but yes and is such a huge thing. The plot is kept under control because there’s six of us all trying to reach an end point and we’re all sort of reaching towards that common goal of there is some peril and we need to resolve it in a way that’s fun and entertaining. So as soon as anyone goes on stage and says anything, that’s immediately real and immediately part of the world and immediately part of the plot.

Lou Dunn (41:27.576)
Mm.

Lou Dunn (41:43.905)
Yeah.

James Gamblin (41:45.062)
has a way, both in our show and just in any, especially long-form improv that you’ll see, the fact that everyone sort of really adheres to that and knows that anything that’s done on stage immediately becomes real. Even if it blatantly contradicts something that just happened, which we all try and avoid, occasionally it does happen, but that makes it real. there are six of us pulling in.

Lou Dunn (42:08.387)
Mm.

James Gamblin (42:13.282)
in the same general direction. We might not all have the same exact idea in our head as to how we get there, but as soon as everyone, anyone says something on stage, that immediately recalibrates the other five performers of, okay, I was thinking Daleks, but you’re hinting towards Cybermen, so what can I bring that helps to hint towards Cybermen? And that’s one of the, I mentioned yes and the other, I guess the slightly less,

Lou Dunn (42:22.563)
Yeah.

Lou Dunn (42:34.007)
Yeah.

James Gamblin (42:42.386)
joyful way of thinking about that is kill your darlings. Like you could have a brilliant idea of how this plot could unfold. Someone might walk on stage and say something that completely puts pay to that entirely, kills it dead.

Lou Dunn (42:46.915)
Mm.

Lou Dunn (42:55.47)
Yeah, I had to learn that so hard. The first few times we doing the show, I would be off stage writing a full novel in my head of exactly where this is going. And then someone would come up with that line and be like, oh no. And it’s a habit I’ve absolutely had to break. Again, it seems like a stupid thing to say, but you kind of have to make it up as you go along. Because even if we did try and plan this show, that would work so much less than just you just roll with whatever happened last on stage.

John (43:20.253)
Yes.

Lou Dunn (43:23.758)
The other thing as well, this is sort of more of a, I don’t know, slightly more ethereal hippie-ish theory I have, I think stories are quite intuitive. I think people know how a story is meant to go and there’s an instinct within you to go like, you know, if a character is presented as villainous, we’re going to have to see them fail. And if we’re going to have to see them fail, what can we establish early on that’s going to be their fatal flaw? Like these things, if you pay attention enough to the stories that you’re telling.

you will just, it will start to click, you will start to realize. And in a group of six people like us who’ve been performing for nine years doing this show, and longer in general, we know each other’s instincts by now. We know that if, like, I think at this stage people in the troupe know if I’m coming onto the stage quickly, in between scenes they’re like, Lou’s about to add three things to the plot. So we’ll all get ready for that.

James Gamblin (44:21.926)
So pay attention everyone, because we’ll need them later.

Lou Dunn (44:23.04)
Yes, yeah.

Manny (44:27.389)
When you’re talking about

Callum Macdonald (44:27.637)
Manny (44:34.269)
assessing each other’s characters there, but you know, each other’s style of doctor, which could easily end in a fight if there was alcohol involved. But anyway, at the end of the show, do you all have to suddenly, like, I’ve got the five o’clock train to catch, I’ve got the 11 o’clock train to catch, or do you have time for a civilised pint and to kind of debrief how the show went?

Lou Dunn (44:45.304)
you

Lou Dunn (45:03.518)
Depends where we are. At the end of a fringe, we debrief every show. So after the show, we’ll go to the performers bar, we’ll sit down and we’ll just quickly go through the episode and go, right, what worked, what didn’t? What’s something that you liked today? What’s something that you need to improve on? Sometimes on tour, it is in and out. We would leave, people are, as you say, we did Leicester Comedy Festival recently, which is one of my favorite comedy festivals. And like after the show, there were some people who were like, right, my train is now goodbye. So.

Generally we try and debrief but the realities of the logistics of these things you can’t always adhere to it. And I think early on it was very important that we debriefed every show. Now that we’re like nine, 10 years in, sometimes it’s great and sometimes you’re like, actually it’s fine guys, we know what we did today was what we were meant to do and we don’t need to hash over every detail.

Manny (45:53.275)
Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Also, you mentioned there that you do the Leicester Comedy Show, and obviously when you’re on tour, is it normally comedy shows, or have you ever done this at a Comic Con, for instance?

Lou Dunn (46:02.606)
Mm.

Lou Dunn (46:10.53)
think we’d like to.

James Gamblin (46:10.864)
We’ve only ever really done comedy festivals because that’s where I think a lot of our contacts lie more than anything else. We’d love to do more Comic-Con type things because we think as a show it’s ideally suited to it.

Lou Dunn (46:21.07)
You

Lou Dunn (46:31.148)
Yeah. The thing is we don’t have the foot in the door at the moment. Like I’ve contacted conventions in the past and just sadly not had responses. And it’s a difficult thing. We know the world of comedy. We know how to put on a show at the end of a fringe. We know how to book the Leicester Comedy Festival. We’re doing Camden Fringe the next couple of weekends. And that’s just because I can pop open this app called Eventotron. And that will just list every fringe festival going in the country. And I’ll go, right, contact them then. We’ll see if they’ll take us on.

Manny (46:58.904)
Yeah, I’d be interested to see what Callum or John think. Myself personally, you I love all of the sci-fi stuff. So while Doctor Who might generally be kind of sometimes light-hearted, sometimes dramatic, you’ve got things like Red Dwarf and Galaxy Quest, which are just out and out hilarious, but they’re still in the sci-fi genre. And I’ve seen those things at Comic-Cons and a lot of people like them there, even though they were…

Yeah, argued there were more comedies than sci-fi.

Callum Macdonald (47:31.701)
Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah, Dr. Who’s got a welcome place. One thing I was going to briefly touch on, yeah, we’ve got a few minutes left, is your suggestions of the unexpected show now, I kind of recognize the title, of the Unexpected, it’s a Tales of the Unexpected mixed with Twilight Zone, as I understand it.

Lou Dunn (47:55.046)
Yeah, so this is welcome to the difficulties of trying to establish an original brand. So the thing with Suggestions of the Unexpected, the pitch is its anthology horror comedy. So the idea is, is that we do generally three stories that are based on audiences fears, superstitions, dreams they’ve had things like that. It’s sort of it’s definitely I think the Twilight Zone was sort of the original inspiration, wasn’t it James? That was sort of

Callum Macdonald (47:59.337)
Yeah

James Gamblin (48:20.26)
Yeah, like that’s, I think it was after a few years of doing Any Suggestions, Doctor, which we all sort of really loved doing and still do love doing, but we’d reached sort of a point almost where we thought, well, what else is there? What more can we do? And in doing Any Suggestions, Doctor, yes, it’s a lighthearted parody. Yes, it’s a comedy show. But occasionally we do hit on some really dark themes and some really dark endings sometimes.

Lou Dunn (48:48.739)
Mm.

James Gamblin (48:49.176)
A few shows we’ve done with any suggestions doctor where, you know, the doctors had to wipe a companion’s memory. and you know, being the companion in that instance, I was genuinely on stage trying to muster up real tears. so we, we had this sort of dramatic itch to scratch, I guess, and thinking about what can we do that’s a bit more atmospheric that still has the comedy element, but where we can utilize.

Lou Dunn (49:02.83)
Hmm.

Lou Dunn (49:15.318)
Hmm. There was…

James Gamblin (49:17.784)
improvisation as a storytelling mechanism and we sort of brought it up earlier with the fact that everyone in the audience is there and on board and sort of the fact that everyone is aware that it’s being made up on the spot kind of almost brings an extra element of realism or buying from the audience. How can we use that in a way that’s maybe less comedy forward and a bit more other emotions? So we ended up landing on

I think improvised Twilight Zone as an idea, not because Twilight Zone as a specific IP was something that we wanted to riff off of or pastiche, but just that kind of captured the broad scope of what we wanted to do. And we’ve landed on suggestions of the unexpected.

Lou Dunn (50:00.398)
Yeah, one of the big original appeals for Doctor Who was anywhere in space and time because I think one of the things that’s really important in improv comedy is to make it so that the suggestion feels genuine and like it could be anything. So I always think it’s the best one of the things I love about Doctor Who as a format is every genre.

It’s done murder mystery, it’s done horror, it obviously is sci-fi, it’s done romance. You can make a big pitch to the fact that the Russell T. Davies, the first year around, was massively romantic. What you tend to get, and I’m gonna try and be nice about this, there are improv shows at the Fringe that are also IP improv shows where I can’t understand how they make it different every time.

because their setting or their idea is so fixed and so locked into an existing idea that I’m like, how is this not just, you know, the same story with different little details being changed? And I think when we came up with this idea, like the Twilight Zone, if you watch the Twilight Zone, again, that show is everything and anything. It is funny, is horror, it is sci-fi, there’s no consistency between characters. And so again, it was tapping into that idea. Originally, we were like,

Callum Macdonald (51:06.932)
Yeah.

Lou Dunn (51:15.758)
We’re going to do this seriously. We’re going to do a serious improv horror show. We’re going to actually be scary. We’re going to actually go out there and be like scary and dramatic. And we rehearsed it. And no matter how many times we tried to do that, we always ended up making a joke because we’re just a silly bunch of people. eventually we’re just like, there’s no point trying to defy our nature for our own pretension. We’re going to make this a funny show.

Callum Macdonald (51:31.455)
Yes.

James Gamblin (51:40.294)
And it’s like, it’s worth saying, it is still a funny show, but we’ve definitely, I guess, as a proportion of every show, can end up a lot darker. And even with the Doctor Who show, with any station’s doctor, we’re gonna introduce a dark element and then diffuse that with a joke quite quickly. Whereas with Suggestions of the Unexpected, we tend to manage to let it go quite a lot further so that it is genuinely quite dark and spooky. And we’ve had some audiences sort of…

Lou Dunn (51:48.43)
Hmm.

James Gamblin (52:09.082)
gasp at a reveal or something, but then let it go a little bit further and then still diffuse it with a joke or juxtapose the fact that you know something quite horrific is happening with jokes that we found sort of works quite well as a storytelling and an entertainment mechanism and also doesn’t stray too far from our very silly nature as six very silly people.

Lou Dunn (52:11.222)
Yeah.

Callum Macdonald (52:34.261)
John, I think you were wanting to come in there.

John (52:38.042)
No, no, not me, I’m Sorry. That’s done nothing for continuity, has it, really?

Callum Macdonald (52:40.084)
right.

Callum Macdonald (52:44.753)
No, that’s all right. Martin, are you ready to say something?

Lou Dunn (52:45.646)
You

Manny (52:49.422)
Absolutely, I have to ask this and and please please be honestly, okay? Have you ever watched an episode of Doctor Who since you started doing this and you’ve thought That was our show they ripped off

Lou Dunn (52:55.534)
He

Lou Dunn (53:09.818)
now, right. So I do know, not from the TV show, we’ve had people who write some of the big Finnish audios see our show, and one of them has explicitly said, your show inspired me to get out of a writer’s block I’d given myself. Like we gave them the idea to get out of a particular problem. Unfortunately, I don’t know which thing it is, but I know that that’s probably the most direct inspiration we’ve had on any official Doctor Who media.

yeah, there’s definitely, particularly in Shooties run, there’s definitely been episodes we’ve watched and gone that they’re writing the show like we would improvise it now. Like this, there’s, there’s some genuinely silly things happening now that we’re like, I think, I don’t know. So, you know, they did the most, the most recent series, the first episode of the most recent series where,

Manny (53:39.45)
That is amazing. You must have felt a bit of a buzz when this told you that.

Lou Dunn (54:07.022)
The villain was defeated by turning them back into a sperm and an egg. And then they were swept up by a cleaning robot. And after that episode, Matt messaged me to say, if we ended an episode with a cum-guzzling robot, Charles would be telling us off after the show.

Manny (54:12.272)
Yeah.

James Gamblin (54:17.167)
Haha!

Manny (54:23.384)
Ha!

James Gamblin (54:27.194)
You

Callum Macdonald (54:27.583)
Ha ha ha!

Lou Dunn (54:28.851)
So it’s like, but this is it, like Doctor Who is a lighthearted and silly and comedic show. So when we do a parody of it, sometimes there is that overlap.

Manny (54:39.99)
Absolutely. I have another question for you, which is, know, seriously, would any one of you genuinely really like to play the Doctor?

James Gamblin (54:53.542)
I think if Russell T. gave any of us a call tomorrow, every single one of us would bite his hand off.

Manny (54:58.306)
Yep. Yes! That’s the…

Callum Macdonald (55:02.666)
with

Lou Dunn (55:02.966)
I think realistically I would have, I would want to be a very memorable villain rather than the Doctor because there’s no better way to stay in the fan’s imagination than turning up being brilliant, not dying and then leaving so that for the next however many years until the heat death of the universe, they’ll go, what if they’re bringing back that character?

Manny (55:11.438)
Ooh.

Manny (55:27.096)
yeah.

Lou Dunn (55:27.138)
because that’s all the fandom wants is for that character to come back, insert whatever character’s still alive in the canon that you want to see again.

Manny (55:35.096)
Yeah, that’s interesting idea. I like that.

Callum Macdonald (55:40.213)
Okay, we are coming up on time right now. So John or Martin, do you have any final questions for our guests?

Manny (55:50.711)
I do. Sorry John, go ahead.

John (55:50.728)
Okay, it was just like Martin.

What’s your plans going forward from here?

Lou Dunn (56:01.026)
Well, at time of recording, we’re about to go and do the Camden Fringe. So we’ve got two shows on this weekend, 2nd 3rd of August, at Playground Theatre. And then next week, 8th and 9th of August, we’re off to do the Museum of Comedy, and we’re doing Suggestions of the Unexpected. Those are the immediate plans that we’ve got coming up.

Callum Macdonald (56:25.268)
Martin?

Manny (56:27.434)
I was thinking we’re going to take time from now to midnight. I was going to ask them from funny stories from universities and the university.

Callum Macdonald (56:36.692)
Yeah

Lou Dunn (56:39.118)
actually, you know what? I’ve got a cracking story for you that’s really fun for us because it involves both me and James. And hopefully as I tell this story, James will remember it because this predates us doing this show, which is that both James and I have been the chair of the Comedy Society. We were both fortunate enough to do that. And genuinely, as the as the fun end of year show to hand over, we filmed a regeneration.

James Gamblin (57:02.854)
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lou Dunn (57:05.442)
We fully did it, we fully did the me getting shot going somewhere and then James coming back in wearing my clothes going, I feel all funny with. And that was long before we had any idea of doing Improvise Doctor Who. So it’s always been there.

Manny (57:18.831)
That sounds pretty funny.

Callum Macdonald (57:23.343)
And I suppose just to, where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you or if they want to book you if anyone’s been listening here?

Lou Dunn (57:32.878)
So social media is at as improv. We’re on Instagram. We’re not on the Nazi sites anymore. We are on Facebook. You can also go to any suggestions improv.co.uk. We have a website there with the contact form. So you can drop us an email and get in touch that way. And just generally keep an eye out on your various fringe festivals. Because odds are we’re going to come to you if we can make it.

Callum Macdonald (57:41.077)
Yep, good idea.

Callum Macdonald (57:57.075)
Okay, well with that it’s the standard question I ask all our guests. Would you ever consider coming up to Stornoway?

Lou Dunn (58:07.158)
Yeah, I love the black pudding. Yeah. Yeah, genuinely, we would consider it. If we could get the logistics in place, it be a grand old time.

James Gamblin (58:08.71)
Just try and stop me.

Callum Macdonald (58:08.795)
Really? Alright. Well…

Callum Macdonald (58:17.277)
Alright, well hopefully that’s a watch this space moment where something might happen there.

Manny (58:23.078)
I second that.

Callum Macdonald (58:25.043)
Yeah, I think John would be on board with that as well, wouldn’t you? And John’s even got a Dalek he can bring along for you for your show. We’ve got a replica Dalek.

John (58:28.324)
on date and date.

Lou Dunn (58:34.365)
full-sized Dalek! Because we’ve had a genuine K9, but we’ve never had a genuine Dalek, so I’d love to get a genuine Dalek.

John (58:37.478)
Yeah, we have a daughter that can’t starve.

James Gamblin (58:37.959)
my goodness.

Callum Macdonald (58:44.221)
So there you go, we’ve now just given you the carrots for you to come up here.

Lou Dunn (58:48.927)
You

John (58:49.896)
sprinkling a little nerdy catnip across the end of the podcast.

Callum Macdonald (58:56.039)
Alright guys, thank you very much. Thank you John, thank you Martin for co-hosting tonight.

John (59:03.236)
Thank you too.

Manny (59:04.007)
Robin, is that a pleasure?

Callum Macdonald (59:06.35)
And thank you to James and Lou for coming along and being our guest. It’s been fantastic. I loved having you along and hopefully we’ll be in touch in the future.

Lou Dunn (59:15.128)
Great stuff, love being on it.

James Gamblin (59:16.934)
Thank very much. been a pleasure.

Callum Macdonald (59:17.301)
All right. right. And thank you everyone for listening. We’ll be back very soon with another show and just take care everyone. Bye.