Who By Fire

I've just come back up to Moray after a few days in Glasgow and the Machars of Galloway. I was deep in "Wicker Man" country: the Isle of Whithorn, in fact.

  

I also stopped for a while at Monreith Bay, which is a childhood haunt of mine. My wanderings around SW Scotland have become an annual tradition in tha last five years; I've also posted in the past about associating the summer holidays with Conan and Dr. Who paperbacks.

Additionally, I have a nostalgic fondness for the summer special: the British holiday tradition of seaside-themed exploits for comic characters. While the special above gives the lie to its charming and amsuing cover with a brain-meltingly tedious list of filming locations, the special below reprints some classic DW strips, including the idiosyncatic Junkyard Demon. The 2000 AD style exploits of Abslom Dakk also appear again, with a framing device that strikingly anticipates 1986's Trial of a Time Lord.

My journeys from the North East to the South West are long ones: trains from Elgin to Glasgow Queen Street (3.5 hours) and then from Glasgow Central to Stranraer, (2.5 hrs) with the Galloway portion involving infrequent local buses. So, the soundtracks tend to be Big Finish audio plays. Today's post reviews the discs I've listened to in the last four or five weeks.

The Defectors: The first of the "Locum Doctors" Trilogy in which Past Doctors swap companions. Here Jo Grant and the Seventh Doctor uncover a Roswell-style conspiracy on a remote island. This is a feeble comic strip tale, with tremulous toff UNIT officers and noisy, rather silly, flying aquatic aliens. Nicholas Briggs seems to intend it as a tribute to Brit cheapie horror Island of Terror. Katy Manning doesn't quite pull off her younger self of forty years ago. Why not make it the groovy granny Jo from tv's Sarah Jane Adventures? Puerile stuff.  1/5 Tlamars

Suburban Hell: a Fourth Doctor parody of Abigail's Party with elements of The Mist by Stephen King. Blackly humorous but not as funny as Alan Barnes perhaps thinks it is, much like the original tv play. ( I was cast as the stressed husband in a stage version in 1993, but dropped out due to a minor operation). However, a novel idea but better as a comic strip, I think.  2/5 Talmars

Masquerade: Dangerous Liaisons parody by Stephen Cole which rehashes Moffats's Girl in the Fireplace. Complex tale of the Fifth Doctor trapped in a virtual world while alien terrorists are spreading plague. Totally unengaging with a downbeat ending.  1/5 Talmars

Equilibrium:  Matt Fitton's second installment of the Fifth Doctor's Return to E-Space Trilogy and a visit to a Nordic planet that isn't what it seems. Possibly a parody of Frozen? Not much for the sizeable Tardis crew to do. The Game of Thrones-style "snowglobe" world/' experiment was well-realised however, 3/5 Talmars

The Entropy Plague: Jonathan Morris delivers the final installment of the E-Space trilogy. A homage to tv's Warriors Gate with some Frankenstein/zombie imagery. The monsters and the eponymous plague in the doomed pocket universe are somewhat perfunctory but the device of four narrators works well. The final farewell of the older Nyssa (with its callback to Sara Kingdom) is rather touching.   4/5 Talmars

 The Well-Mannered War: the adaptation of the final Missing Adventure. Despite the mixture of Adams-ish whimsy and Hinchcliffe horror, I didn't find it terribly compelling.  The strange, metafictional epilogue, which signalled the end of the Virgin books, has been retained, oddly enough. 3/5 Talmars

Damaged Goods: a far more successful adaptation of Russell T. Davies' controversial Virgin novel of 1997. I didn't care for the original book at the time; I felt it was absurd to drop Sylvester McCoy's Doctor into an Irvine Welsh scenario of squalid drug deals and furtive gay sex, juxtaposed with interstellar warfare.   However, many of those story elements, while still present, are placed in context by a domestic tragedy inspired by the musical Blood Brothers.

Despite some sidelining for the Doctor and Roz Forrester, this is a well-cast play with an emotional heft. With some neutering of its more "gritty" moments, it could have been a vehicle for Eccleston's Ninth Doctor. There's also a sombre and dramatic new theme, which recalls the orchestral versions of the TV movie and 2006's Season Two.  5/5 Talmars.

There's a new reference to Torchwood in the Damaged Goods play, trailing a new series of Cardiff adventures with Big Finish. It's interesting that, for commercial purposes I imagine, BF has also secured rights to use characters from Nu Who, including the Weeping Angels, the Judoon and River Song. For a long time, the compnay was the only place that some of the more outlandish interepretations of Who could be found, embracing elements as diverse as the Virgin novels, the DWM strips and the stage plays. It would be a pity to lose all that strangeness.  I wonder if, however, now the company is more aligned with its parent on tv, we might see original audio material from RTD?  Despite everything I've ever said previously about the petulant and sanctimonious Last of the Time Lords, I would like to hear the return of Tennant's boyish, Mockney Doctor.

Coming soon: the immortal Iron Fist
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