"I won't go yell-ow to the chairrrrrr!"
The Dalek Time Controller, yesterday. And tomorrow. And next May. Possibly.
Here we are, finally, on the Twelfth Day of Christmas. I've been down to see my mum in Glasgow for a couple of days, passing through my childhood haunts, Strathaven and Hamilton. I also visited friends and caught a performance of the brilliant Aganeza Scrooge at the Tron Theatre, with Ayrshire's own Johnny McKnight in the hilarious ( and intimidating!) lead role. For the four-hour train journey back and forth, I listened to some Doctor Who audio plays.
Dark Eyes is a box set of four discs which really tell one long story. It revitalises Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor ( including his wardrobe and haircut) and introduces formidable Irish companion, Molly O' Sullivan.
At the end of Lucie Miller/To the Death, the Doctor lost two companions and a blood relative during the second Dalek Invasion of Earth. Dark Eyes portrays an embittered Doctor in a rematch with the Outer Space Robot People, thanks to the machinations of the Time Lord Straxus.
Rescuing Molly O'Sullivan from the Daleks during WWI, the Doctor is pursued by his oldest enemies to the Second World War; the early Seventies; the planet Skaro where a benevolent Dalek race appears to have evolved; and into a final confrontation with the Dalek Time Controller and the mysterious Kotris (played with languid menace by the BBC's Hitchcock, Toby Jones).
Big Finish essentially play bait and switch with tv's Time War in this box set. I was less frustrated by those allusions however than by twee elements in the script. Repeated references to the Doctor's "penny whistle" (sonic screwdriver ), to his "Tardy-Box" and alien pronunciations (" Moll-E!") became maddening. The story is unnecessarily long and one section is, frustratingly, an hallucination. ( "It was all a dream", Briggsy? Seriously?) However, McGann returns to the role with attack and Ruth Bradley replaces Sheridan Smith seamlessly as the acerbic but loyal Molly; I hope we hear from this team again. Three out of Five Talmars.
Before there was audio and long before Billie Piper was ever linked with the Tardy-box, Dr. Who existed as several ranges of novels, aimed at young adults. Many of those books and their authors have been highly influential in NuWho.
Love and War, unusually, is the audio adaptation of a Virgin New Adventure ( the ninth) on its twentieth anniversary. This is the book in which author Paul Cornell introduced Bernice Summerfield, a hard-drinking archaeologist with phoney qualifications, modelled (loosely) on the young Emma Thompson.
Bernice Summerfield and the Scrotum of Fear
Bernice has of course starred for years in her own novel and audio range -which actually predates Big Finish's Dr. Who licence. She's been arguably the most successful (and indeed canon-busting) spin-off from the series. (River Who?*) Big Finish have referenced the Virgin Era a couple of times before but here, the story actually revolves around Sophie Aldred's Ace, who falls in love for the first time. This event precipitates her exit from the books, for a short while.
The Doctor and Ace encounter Benny and a group of spacey-wacey New Age Travellers on the cemetery planet Heaven. Benny and the Doctor discover the disappearance of the indigenous Heavenites is connected to the silent gas dirigibles of the Hoothi. This is a fungoid species which feeds on other living beings,absorbing their memories and either sprouting out of or animating their dead bodies. So: a spongy, grey, spore-laden version of the Borg, in essence.
Ace, meanwhile, has a bunk-up with a Traveller named Jan who, with his best friend Christopher, has gained X-Men-style powers from military experimentation. The zombie invasion of Heaven and the Hoothi's ambitions for Gallifrey can only be stopped by self-sacrifice- well, as Ace might say, it's all in the title, birdbath.
The Tardis trio of McCoy, Aldred and Bowerman does a wonderful job of creating early Nineties versions of their characters in what would otherwise be an angsty, rather predictable tale. There are some cringey, shouty moments - and the kissing really does just sound like Aldred giving her own hand a smacker- but Love and War is an authentic evocation of a significant era for Who. Four out of Five Talmars.
Coming soon: The Old (Bendis) Order Changeth
(* Actually, she probably is Mrs. River Who, as far as Reader's Digest is concerned)
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