Soul of a New Machine

British Summer Time begins at last tomorrow, although the daffs have been out in Giffnock for a couple of weeks. It's a sunny, sharp day in suburbia and time to review some Big Finish audio plays again.

Naturally, since I relocated, I don't make the same lengthy train journeys to the North East as I did from 2010-2016 ( although I use suburban lines all the time to travel to work in this local authority). Therefore, I'm consuming the audios far more slowly than I used to. For example, I bought the second box set of Diana comic strip adventures for The Avengers before Christmas but only listened to them last month. I also have the first Dan Dare box on the shelf...

The set opens with Playtime is Over, a tale of "impossible" robberies committed by the villainess Black heart and her gang of midgets, impersonating children and armed with deadly toys. The second story is The Antagoniser, when wild animals attack television personalities, such as a thinly disguised Germaine Greer. The Mad Hatter - sadly not David " Bee-yat-man" Wayne menaces Princess Helga of Varania; and an international criminal coterie, The Secret Six challenge Steed and Mrs. Peel in a parody of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

This series of frothy, daffy adventures from the Sixties is delivered with charm and affection. The Antagoniser is very similar to the tv episode The Hidden Tiger but there's nothing to match the drollery of The Norse Code in the previous set.

Of course Sydney Newman's other deathless creation, Doctor Who, carries on at Big Finish with an unstoppable output featuring multiple incarnations of the Time Lord. The Beast of Kravenos is the first instalment in the latest season of adventures for Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor.

This year, we're getting pastiches of Season 18, Tom's last hurrah on tv as the Oxbridge humour of Douglas Adams was phased out in favour of maths and hard sci-fi by John Nathan-Turner and Christopher Bidmead. Kravenos however, is in the vein of Meglos as K9 trundles across the boards of a Victorian music hall. Jago and Litefoot team up with Tom and Lalla in a jolly Jekyll and Hyde parody, with an alien McGuffin from Forbidden Planet and Spock's Brain.

Justin Richards, author of The Invisible Detective series and DW novels The Clockwise Man and Silhouette clearly enjoys the late Victorian era. It's a little too much like 2013's Justice of Jalxar, however, for my liking. Convivial (4/5)

We remain in the early Eighties for The Star Men by Andrew Smith. This Fifth Doctor story is high-concept sci-fi with space coral zombies emerging from nebulous star factories. Smith channels something of the nerdy fan that, well, we both were in 1982 and the first two episodes are really engaging. But it descends into awkward melodrama with a fey reptile man and an unlikely doomed romance for Adric- in the tradition of Ben, Jamie and Ace in the 90s novels. It's not exactly "vanilla", more salted caramel. Disappointing (2/5)

Quicksilver by Matt Fitton is a Sixth Doctor adventure where the marriage of officious Wren Constance Clarke and her husband disintegrates in a sci-fi parody of The Third Man. Henry isn't ruthless enough to be Harry Lime but this is a sad, funny and gripping story. I'm happy to say it's also a false exit for Constance, who plays well against Flip, the Rose Tyler-lite companion BF insists on foisting on us again. The city of Vienna isn't evoked very clearly. any more than Budapest was in The Labyrinth of Buda castle but the alien tech used for war ties neatly back to Constance's debut in Criss Cross. Adult (4/5)

War Doctor: Casualties of War is the fourth and final trio of exploits for the late John Hurt's grizzled Time Lord. After an encounter with a war reporter on a desert planet, the War Doctor is reunited with space guerrilla Leela, the eponymous Lady of Obsidian. Leela is a victim of Dalek tech and has memories of alternative lives, not unlike Clara the Impossible Girl. She assists the Doctor against an extra-dimensional threat from another one of those Dalek quantum gateways so beloved of Nicholas Briggs. Are they all the same thing? Does he care?
 The spikey, campy relationship between Hurt and Jacqueline Pearce's imperious Ollistra is fun but I found it hard to sympathise greatly with Time War Leela. The set is all a bit unsatisfactory and inconsequential, which is my general complaint about BF's long-form storytelling. Like Dark Eyes and Doom Coalition, I think there's probably a quartet of great plays to be harvested across the multiple box sets. Less would be more, I reckon. Anticlimactic (2/5)

The opposite is true of the mammoth third volume of Vworp Vworp, a beautifully curated fanzine celebrating Doctor Who Weekly & Doctor Who Magazine. This issue features an interview with comics magus, Alan Moore, creator of the Special Executive; Dalekmania and TV Century 21; and Abslom Daak: Dalek Killer, who recently returned in the fiendishly complex Then and the Now arc in Titan Comics' exploits of the Eleventh Doctor.

The free minidisc album and cd,  adapting the 1965 Dalek World story by Terry Nation and David Whitaker, is a delightful vignette with Mechanoids and the Golden Emperor. With its soundscape from Doctor Who and the Daleks, it reminds me of the epic BF Dalek Empire series, which is the zenith of Briggs' work for the company. Highly recommended.

Next time: Moc yeah, king yeah, bird yeah

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