First day of the Tattie Holidays: despite the chill, the sun is out and drifts of red, papery leaves are rattling across Cooper Park. It's time for a (lengthy) collection of reviews of Doctor Who product from the late summer and early autumn.
On the last day of term, I presented a talk to a lunchtime audience-primarily S1- about what it took to be the Doctor's Companion ( the answer is, you have to be courageous, loyal and a bit reckless. Being Scottish also helps). I should have also pointed out the similarities with being a football fan: many grim debacles and the occasional dazzling performance. Big Finish productions carried the torch for DW for half a decade before the success of the tv revival. But the sheer scale of the company's output means quality can be wildly inconsistent.
We are the Daleks is a heavy- handed satire as Seven and Mel get involved with the launch of a computer game masterminded by the Outer Space Robot People. There is some irony in listening to Labour supporter Jonathan Morris turning Tory Yuppies into Dalek agents.
In the Tom Baker range, Morris reworks 1978 ITV Armchair Thriller "Quiet as a Nun" for Cloisters of Terror. The guest star is Liz Shaw's mum, Emily, as the Dean of an Oxford college for women. It's not creepy enough - unlike, say, Iterations of I-and I can't remember how it ended.
Nothing much happens in Fate of Krelos/Return to Telos, the two-part finale of the Tom & Louise season. It only seems to exist to explain why the white console room returned in 1977. The fall of the computer-friendly civilization of Krelos to the Cybermen seems too hurried and there are too many scenes of buzzing Cybermen talking to each other- hopeless on audio. In an homage to the Deep Space Nine Tribbles episode, Four and Leela are injected into Tomb of the Cybermen. Frazer Hines cameos as Jamie and the Second Doctor, but since the Tardis teams never interact, it's all rather pointless.
The First Doctor Box Set of the revived Companions Chronicles was another disappointment. The Susan episode is tedious and the two episodes of Steven Taylor as King Lear aren't very dramatic, although the Ben Franklin cameo is cute. The best story features the sprightly Vicki bringing sedition to an alien city in The Unwinding World. Peter Purves is a great reader, with plenty of attack and energy, as evinced by The Massacre audiobook, where he invests John Lucarotti's baffling reworking of the interminable 1966 historical with verve.
The Third Doctor Box Set comprises two adventures- Prisoners of the Lake by Justin Richards and Havoc of Empires by Andy Lane. The gimmick is the recasting of the late Jon Pertwee by Welsh actor Tim Treloar. There is some resemblance in their voices but it's not terribly convincing, especially when the quality of Katy Manning's voice has quite clearly changed.
As we'll see momentarily, tv has rather scooped Richards but as usual he delivers a workmanlike, plodding story with unmemorable dialogue. He's a creative "ideas man" but his work lacks verve and pace. On the plus side, I liked the Radiophonic-style soundscape and Robbie Stevens provides a likeable engineer in Jonny Repford even if his Scots accent is shaky. The whole enterprise was somewhat superior to the second adventure- a bland confection about an arranged marriage in space between warring factions, which felt anachronistically like Babylon Five.I didn't hate it but it was all terribly safe and predictable.
The Gods of Winter is the first original audiobook to feature the Twelfth Doctor and Clara. It's not a reading of a novel nor is it a full-cast play, like Big Finish. It's written by James Goss, whose work I often enjoy. This, however, is a disappointment. The Doctor arrives twice, like in 1966's The Ark, on a colony planet attacked by the alien Golhearn. Aside from the nostalgic plot, the generic Socts accent reader Claire Higgins gives Twelve is grating- although she gives Clara a trace of Blackpool.
In a similar vein, the new Twelfth Doctor books - The Glamour Chronicles - are nothing to write home about. Despite being the best-written, Una McCormack's Royal Blood is totally forgettable. I recall something about Sir Lancelot and a band of knights searching for the Holy Grail in space.Er, that's it. Big Bang Generation, a bait and switch about River Song reveals itself to be an almost incomprehensible homage to the Big Finish Bernice Summerfield range of audios. It's set in Australia and seems also to be a parody of Hustle. After over twenty years of tie-in books, Gary Russell remains a very poor writer, assuming the audio and the book audience is the same ( as it probably was in the late 90s). I'm still wading through Trevor Baxendale's latest grisly and sadistic YA horror, Deep T:me- it's more Star Trek than Dr. Who, I'm afraid.
Four Doctors was Titan Comics' late summer crossover event by Paul Cornell. A timey-wimey plot by the Voord drew Doctors ten, Eleven and Twelve together, with guest-appearances by Nine and John Hurt's War Doctor. It was a little too long and the comic book companions, Gabby and Alice, were eclipsed and sidelined. There were some good jokes, however: references to the script of The Three Doctors and the likenesses were accurate .
But in the crucial arena of timeshifted tv, does DW still have what it takes? I'd have to say I haven't disliked this series so far but I'm still cautious. Last year's outings for Capaldi definitely didn't grab me immediately: the theme music was abrasive and shrill; the characterisation of the Doctor was unlikeable and the tone was inappropriately morbid while fetishising the military; and poor Clara, who had clearly outlived her usefulness as a plot device, had a number of false exits.
This year's opening two-parter was basically a vehicle for the scene-stealing Missy although the Doctor's dilemma over diddy Davros was interesting in its ambiguity. The inexplicable Colony Sarff was played by yet another actor I had worked beside, too. The second two-parter reminded me of the Virgin New Adventures as it layered obscurity and tricksiness on a Trad Base Under Siege story that felt overly-familiar.
Interesting things are happening, in terms of narrative structure and voice, which is more than can be said for the majority of the BF output of late. I'm enjoying the Brusque Old Punk Doctor more than the Vitriolic Magician. But there must surely be a route between the safety of nostalgia and metatextual cleverness.
I want to end on a positive note so the most enjoyable audio I've heard recently is The Triumph of Sutekh box set. Although, yes, it's all about rehashing Pyramids of Mars, yes, it probably meanders too much and no, I'm not sure if New Age Cultists is still "a thing", but it captures the New Adventures line quite well and Gabriel Woolf's voice is chilling, especially when he unleashes his killer scarabs.
Coming soon: The Last Adventure
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