The Book of Kells [8th Doctor + Tamsin Drew]

The Book of Kells is rather good fun but not particularly 'deep' - if that's the right word. Indeed it is, for obvious reasons, not dissimilar to The Time Meddler in tone, plot and pretty much everything else. Although with bonus feisty female companion and a wee little twist at the end, which I quite like.

The Doctor and Tamsin pop up in 11th century Ireland caught hook, line and sinker by some kind of vortex fisherman. Being the Doctor he doesn't just turn up anywhere in 11th century Ireland. He turns up at the Abbey of Kells just as the Book of Kells is about to be completed and King Sitric . And someone is trying to steal the book. Is it Brother Bernard? Is it Lucius? Is it Olaf the Viking? Is it...well...it'll turn out to be slightly more complicated than just nicking a book.

It's got a fantastic cast. Brother Bernard is played by the regularly magnificent Jim CarterThe, King Sitric by Terrance Hardiman, Olaf Eriksson by Nick Brimble and Ryan Sampson as Brother Patrick. They've all got great voices and they all put in lovely performances.

Ash Hindmaster also does a stonking job of Brother Lucianus, the Abbot's side-kick. There's a certain cheekiness to Lucianus, which I quite like.

Then there's Abbot Thelonius aka Thelonius Monk aka The Meddling Monk played with dry wit and a certain style by Graeme Garden. I always liked the Meddling Monk. It was nice to have a dodgy Time Lord who didn't have the entire destruction or domination of the Universe planned. The Meddling Monk was just up to a little temporal trickery: a theft here, a twiddling of the time lines there. Nothing too serious, nothing too nasty. Even if he did find himself forcibly teamed up with the Daleks back in Daleks' Master Plan and comprehensively out-maneuvered by The Doctor.

Garden puts in a great performance as well and some of the hints from the previous stories seem tied to The Meddling Monk too. I assume he was the traveller who put the advert in the paper that the Doctor answered in Situation Vacant and was the Time Lord that kick-started the events in Nevermore. Perhaps not. I think, if the ending of this story is anything to go by we haven't seen the last of the Meddling Monk on Big Finish.

This is also a nice McGann story too as it's all rather light and fluffy so he gets to have some fun as opposed to being required to be all soulful and dark. How long this is going to last for I don't know. It helps that companion Tamsin (Niky Wardley) seems to constantly be stumbling into things, misunderstanding stuff and generally being a bit of a ditz. Wardley's good but Tamsin is midly annoying at points, although gets less so as the story goes on. Perhaps she's meant to be like this to illustrate the kind of fools normal people would make of themselves if being dragged through time and space. We all like to think we'd be heroes. Truth is perhaps we'd just be confused, scared, lost and inclined to make silly mistakes.

Anyway this is all good clean fun. It's nice to have the Monk back. It's nice to have a little bit of light-heartedness.

Enjoy.

Nevermore [8th Doctor + Tamsin Drew]

Nevermore is Doctor Who tinged with Edgar Allen Poe. Well, that's not strictly true. It's really a simple tale about consequences. The consequences of failure. The consequences of a war crime. It's about guilt too but what is guilt but an unintended consequence. 

Of course it could be about none of those things. It's could just be an ongoing adventure in the Doctor Who series. A simple tale of how the Doctor is dumped on Nevermore as the result of a bit of TARDIS sabotage undertaken by a Gallifreyan cat in order to tidy up a nasty problem created by a renegade Time Lord. 

It just so happens that he ends up in a prison designed by a man - Senior Prosecutor Uglos - with a serious Edgar Allen Poe obsession. So the prison guards are giant robotic ravens. Quoth I. The prison is on a planet called Nevermore. A planet that used to be the hang out of the rich until Morella Wendigo decide to assassinate a general. With a biological weapon. A biological weapon so unpleasant that the Time Lords were called in to help tidy it up. That kind of unpleasant biological weapon. 

Wendigo was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in a building set on the planet she destroyed in order to help her contemplate the consequences of her actions, which she has been doing for twenty years. But someone is bumping off Wendigo's compadres and Uglos thinks she might be the next victim. So he's come, along with his assistant Berenice, to ask her some questions. Oddly Uglos is also terrified of cats. Whether they be Gallifreyan or not. Too much Poe.

Of course the Doctor and Tamsin stumble into all of this and Uglos leaps to utterly wrong conclusions. Then the proverbial really hits the fan. I won't spoil it but suffice it to say an ickle Gallfreyan tidpud* is the least of everyone's worries. 

To begin with I wasn't quite into this. The new assistant, Tamsin (Niky Wardley), was being annoying and stupid - actually not stupid...let us say naive - which was distracting. Although there was some amusing stuff about Gallifreyan cats which kept me entertained and the over-arching mystery of the whole darn thing.

Then it gets really creepy. It's not just the cast quoting huge chunks of Poe in a suitable stentorian fashion, although that does help. It's not just the ravens or the red mist. It's the whole atmosphere, especially as the Doctor and Tamsin get tortured and terrified by Uglos, Berenice and Wendigo. The Doctor deals with it in his usual inimitable style but Tamsin is genuinely terrified (and I could see why). Listening to it on headphones whilst travelling back from work on London transport was rather disturbing. 

The performances are great. Michael J Shannon plays Uglos. He's got a great voice for it, especially when quothing Poe left, right and centre. Fenella Woolgar is Wendigo. Woolgar plays Agatha Christie in The Unicorn and the Wasp but couldn't be more different here as an American accented war criminal. It's nice too that Wendigo isn't the obvious monster she could have been. There are layers to Wendigo that sometimes we don't get in Doctor Who characters. Berenice is played by Emilia Fox. I didn't spot her voice at all, which surprised me. And that's a hell of a piece of casting for a minor part. 

Say what you like about Big Finish but the strength of their casts is a constant amazement to me. Well, not constant. That would make me some kind of idiot. But Emilia Fox is great in this. Again a character with layers.

Oh and let me not forget the magnificent McGann who is rather brilliant in this. I particularly like his unbothered response to Uglos's attempt to torture him into some kind of confession and his grumpy interactions with the cat. 

So after all this waffle I should say I enjoyed this a lot. There's a Doctor Who meets The Pit and Pendulum - Karloff and Lugosi version. And then again it's probably something else altogether. 

Quoth the raven. 




*Tidpud is a Cross family name for a cat. Blame my Dad.

Situation Vacant [8th Doctor]

Situation Vacant is rather silly. At least on the surface. Underneath there's hints at something darker going on. It's Doctor Who does The Apprentice and the Doctor gets to be Alan Sugar.

Summoned by an advert from a time traveler looking for a companion four disparate people turn up in a hotel room: Hugh (James Bachman), Asha (Shelley Conn), Theo (Joe Thomas) and Juliet Walsh (Niky Wardley). They're joined by the Doctor who appears to have set a couple of tasks for the team to perform in order to select a companion. These situations are confusing and dangerous. And all is not what it seems. There are hidden agendas and secrets beneath secrets.

As well as one of the best ordinary people in a Doctor Who story since Griffin the Chef in Enemy of the World Rachel, the Polish Hotel Manager (played with aplomb by Joanna Kanska.) Rachel manages to take everything that happens in the story without batting an eyelid and is happy enough with her life not to be swayed by the Doctor's offer of a trip in the TARDIS. It's a nice touch.

Every character, including the Doctor isn't quite what they seem. And neither is the situation into which they find themselves. Someone is playing games with the Doctor and, at this point, we don't know who that person is. What we do know by the end of the story is that they're also a traveller in time and space looking for a companion and that they palmed off the four most difficult candidates on to the Doctor. Or the Doctor stumbled across them. On or t'other.

It's slightly hard to review this story without spoilers. Suffice it to say it rattles along at a fair old pace, it's got two linked mini-adventures inside the bigger 'what the hell's going on here' story line and we get to meet the Eighth Doctor's new companion, Tamsin Drew.

It's not the best Big Finish story but it certainly has an entertainment and amusement value depending of your tolerance for the light-hearted in Doctor Who. I know some Doctor Who fans frown upon that kind of stuff. Me, I tend to quite like it.

The performances are all rather good. James Bachman's Hugh seems like your typical upper class twit of the year but actually there's little bits 'n' bobs of subtly within the performance and an ability to change tack that is rather good. Joe Thomas's Theo isn't the most exciting character but the performance is fine. The same goes for Shelley Conn and Niky Wardley. I particularly like Shelley Conn's shift in character when...well...when that thing happens and then some other stuff happens. You know. Spoiler stuff.

The new companion does come out of the blue a bit but is still probably introduced with more character than Dodo is at the end of The Massacre.

There's also the mystery of who did all of this and who ended up being selected as their travelling companion to be solved. It isn't solved here and the Doctor can't even be bothered to find out at the end, which I quite like. I suspect though this will play out over the course of the next few stories. I can't see it not, although it would be mildly perverse of Big Finish if they didn't. Or if it gets sorted out ten seasons down the line when everyone's forgotten all about this story.

Anyway I enjoyed listening to this on my homeward bound commute. It helped the journey fly by and if nothing else that's something to be grateful to writer Eddie Robson about, which is praise not to be sniffed at.

An Earthly Child [8th Doctor]

An Earthly Child is one of Big Finish's special releases. It's set on Earth. Thirty years have past since the Dalek Invasion and Susan Campbell is calling out to the Universe for help to re-build the Earth. An Earth that is suffering from a global post-traumatic stress disorder. They - we - are afraid of more aliens. Afraid of technology. Earth seems to be marching backwards into the future.

Susan's actions draw the attention of the Guldresi and another mysterious traveller in time and space: The Doctor.

I enjoyed it. It's an interesting postscript to The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It's surprisingly realistic. This feels like how Earth might react post-invasion.

That's certainly the case for Alex Campbell. He's Susan and David Campbell's son. He's half-Gallifreyan. On his mother's side. On heart. And he hates aliens. He's caught between the machinations of his mother and of Faisal Jensen of Earth Unity but eventually he tries to find his own way, despite Susan's intentions to send him off to Gallifrey for a proper education. He's played by Jake McGann, who is Paul McGann's son, which is interesting. It's a good performance as Alex struggles to come to terms with what is happening and who it is. We don't know - at this point - how things will end but it seems a fairly realistic take on what might happen.

Susan is played by Carole Ann Ford. Obviously. It's nice to have a Susan story forty years later that gives her something useful to do. This isn't the Susan of the television series. Obviously. She's older. She's a mother. She's stuck on a backwards planet with nowhere to go. It's almost like the Third Doctor's exile but with the additional burden of a family. She's very good. I particularly like the scene when she's first re-united with the Doctor in a police cell in Bristol. It's rather sweetly done.

The Doctor's on his own this time. So I've slotted this review in here assuming he's just left Lucie Miller at the end of Death in Blackpool. I'm not sure if this is correct or not. But it's my blog, my rules etc.

Paul McGann's brilliant as usual and there's something about his performance now that makes it seem like he's more comfortable with it. Happier being the Big Finish Eighth Doctor. Occasionally - back in some of the Divergent Universe stories for example - he did sound a bit like his heart wasn't in it as much. Perhaps I'm wrong.

Also worthy of applause is Leslie Ash as Marion Fleming. Fleming is a teacher at Bristol University. She's teaching Alex Campbell and ends up assisting the Doctor. It's a nice performance.

The story is written by Marc Platt, who seems to have an interest in the Doctor's family life going all the way back to Lungbarrow, and I like the story, which I think is about fitting in under all its science-fiction pretensions. It's not the most action packed of tales. It's about politics and families so there's a lot of talking* but it's all rather enjoyable.

And it is nice for the Doctor to finally pop back to see Susan, even if it has taken him a long time to do so.


*I KNOW it is audio so it is bound to be wordy but there's wordy and there's wordy. Pfft. I know what I mean. Even if you don't.

Breaking Bubbles & Other Stories (6th Doctor + Peri)

Breaking Bubbles & Other Stories features the Sixth Doctor and Peri in a collection of short adventures. They are Breaking Bubbles by L V Myles; Of Chaos Time, The by Mark Ravenhill; An Eye For Murder by Una McCormack and The Curious Incident of the Doctor in the Night-Time by Nev Fountain. It's a change of structure to the normal Big Finish Main Range.

There isn't really a link between the stories except the presence of the Sixth Doctor and Peri obviously, which in this day and age of story arcs is rather refreshing. None of them is quite what you'd expect either.

Breaking Bubbles is fun because it starts off as one thing and at the moment I started to think it was going to turn out one way, it turned out another. It features a nice performance from Jemma Churchill as Safira Valtris. I'm skating around this a bit because I don't want to spoil it. It's nicely structured and well-performed. Nothing is quite what you think it is.

Of Chaos Time, The is - to borrow a phrase - a timey-wimey twister. The audio equivalent of a tounge-twister. Colin Baker's brilliant here as The Doctor tries to work out what the hell is going on and why. This feels very much like a new Doctor Who story in the Sixth Doctor's clothing.

An Eye For Murder drops the Doctor and Peri into the world of Dorothy L Sayers. It's Doctor Who meets Gaudy Night with a dash of World War Two thriller. This I think was my favourite of the four stories but not for any particularly drastic reasons. It's mainly because I'm a big fan of Dorothy L Sayers work* and this is the one of the four stories where Peri gets the most to do as she plays at being Harriet Vane whilst the Doctor gets to be...well...not Lord Peter Wimsey but placing him in an Oxford women's colleague in the late-1930s changes the Sixth Doctor's vibe a little (and if I was listening correctly the Sixth is out of his usual outfit and into something more tweedily acceptable, which is nice.)

The Curious Incident of the Doctor in the Night-Time is very different to the previous three stories. It's narrated by Michael (Johnny Gibbon) who is - I think - autistic. I've never read or seen The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time so I've no idea how linked to that book this story is so I have to judge it on it's own merits. I'll admit it took me a little getting used to but in the end I loved it. The story itself features The Doctor and Peri looking for a bad thing. A bad thing that for reasons I refuse to reveal here ends up in Michael's hands. To me though this story is about how a person like Michael, with an interesting way of dealing with the world, copes with loss. There's a lovely scene right at the end when the Doctor talks to Michael about the past, which reminded me a little of the scene between The Second Doctor and Victoria in The Tomb of the Cybermen, but that is rather moving in its own right.

So this is well worth a listen. In fact it might be a good gateway into the Sixth Doctor's era on Big Finish. If you like these stories then go back through the Big Finish Sixth Doctor back catalogue. It's like a taster set. I really enjoyed it. Each story contributes something interesting and each story has a different vibe to it. The acting, from all concerned, but particularly from Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant. This isn't the time and place for me to launch into an impassioned defence of Colin Baker's Doctor. You'll have to wait for my book on that.**




*I particularly recommend the Edward Petherbridge-Harriet Walter TV Series from the mid-80s if you're interested in televised Dorothy L Sayers. It's a trilogy of Strong Poison-Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night. Petherbridge is a wonderful Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Walter is Harriet Vane. (My first literary crush btw, but you probably don't need to know that.)

**I'm quite serious about the book thing.

Death in Blackpool [8th Doctor + Lucie Miller]

Death in Blackpool is rather brilliant. OK, it isn't the most cheery of Christmas tales but it is genuinely rather moving. It's got that Eastender's Christmas Special vibe about it: Christmas is when all those horrible family secrets leak out with unintended consequences. The final scene between the Doctor and Lucie in particular is rather wonderful both in the writing - applause to Alan Barnes for that - and the performances.

Sheridan Smith's Lucie Miller is - as usual - belligerently brilliant. Lucie Miller is one of those companions that I'd love to have seen in the television series. I think she'd fit right into New Who. And, after Night of the Doctor, she's canon. As if that matters. It seems though that this is the end of the Doctor's travels with Lucie.

The reason for this is that the truth is out about Aunty Pat. The truth that Aunty Pat is actually a Zygon Warlord called Hagoth - a story told in The Zygon Who Fell To Earth - and that the Doctor and Aunty Pat/Hagoth have been keeping it from her for all this time. It pops Lucie's bubble of trust in the Doctor and so she decides to stay on Earth and leave the Doctor.

It's all spelled out in that last scene, which I might harp on again about for a bit. It's a lovely two hander between Sheridan Smith and Paul McGann. There's a bit of it when The Doctor tries to explain that he isn't a superhero which is amongst the best writing I've seen in any Big Finish Doctor Who story. In fact that whole last scene is one of my favourite bits of Big Finish ever. I even got a wee bit tearful, which is a little embarrassing when you're on public transport but I can cope.

Paul McGann's up to his usual high standards. It makes you bang your head against the table in frustration that he never got a proper television run. He's an excellent actor and his Doctor has so much depth. The fact that he seems to work exceptionally well with Sheridan Smith helps to. The Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller are one of my favourite Doctor-Companion relationships in all of Doctor Who, which is saying a lot. They're up there with The Fourth Doctor and Romana II and the Seventh Doctor and Ace for me.

The other great performance here is Helen Lederer as Aunty Pat. I know Helen Lederer as a comedian more than an actress but she's a revelation here. She handles the dramatic stuff with aplomb and there's a lovely series of conversations in a cupboard with the Doctor which are well-worth a listen.

Oh and a nod to for Jon Glover as a rather down-at-heel Brummie Father Christmas.

However perhaps the greatest credit should go to Alan Barnes for the script. It manages to tell a good Doctor Who adventure whilst slotting in additional layers about trust, love and loss. And almost right at the end he manages to get in the possibility of a little redemption for one of the characters.

Bravo.