Travelling back and forth to Glasgow by train again during August also gave me the opportunity to listen to Big Finish box sets in a more concentrated way than of late. When I came up to flat-hunt, I put on The Ninth Doctor Chronicles. This set presents four adventures from the brief Christopher Eccleston Era of 2005. Many of the new S1 pupils in my class had just been born when these episodes were first broadcast so the Ninth Doctor is as distant to them as William Hartnell was to me, in secondary school.
Since Eccleston is yet to reprise the role- if indeed he ever does- Big Finish supremo Nick Briggs is impersonating him and to my great surprise, he evokes the character very well.
Murray Gold's rousing first version of the DW theme is very exciting and he has never bettered it. (In fact, the Capaldi version was particularly strident and irritating.) The first play however, The Bleeding Heart where aliens die from too much empathy, is a bit forgettable.
The Window on the Moor is all about Emily Bronte and her inspiration after an alien incursion. The third episode, The Other Side, features Bruno Langley's Adam and an invading force known as the Bygone Horde. Finally, Retail Therapy stars the vivacious and very funny Camille Coduri as Jackie Tyler in an entertaining adventure about home sales parties run by alien invaders.
I hadn't expected much from this set and to be honest, Eccleston's Doctor is probably my least favourite of the modern quartet ( quintet- sorry, War Doctor). Having listened to the set, however,
I would be happy to hear more Ninth Doctor adventures, perhaps with John Barrowman or even Billie Piper.
On the day of the move back up, two weeks ago yesterday, I started Classic Doctors, New Monsters Volume 2. Exactly like last year's collection, it pits most of BF's surviving Doctors from the 70s and 80s against monsters from David Tennant's era. "New" is a relative term since some of these "weirdies" are ten years old already.
Again, there are four plays, acting as prequels or sequels to Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, The Runaway Bride and The Shakespeare Code.
Night of the Vashta Nerada by the award-winning John Dorney is set on a amusement park planet haunted by the "piranhas of the air". Pam Ferris plays a part reminiscent of Robert Shaw's character in Jaws. I have enjoyed Dorney's scripts before but I think he gets the Fourth Doctor very wrong : " this isn't my first rodeo". Ugh.
Empire of the Racnoss by Scott Handcock stars Neil the Hippy and Martha Jones's mum in a screechy, giant spider version of Medea. All the theatrical hissing and shrieking gets quite wearing, quite quickly. Davison's mildly sarcastic Fifth Doctor is a welcome contrast to the theatricality of these spider-people,
The Carrionite Curse by Simon Guerrier is set in the Black Country of the 1980s. Guerrier often writes rather dry sci-fi with a tragic conclusion and here, frustratingly, engaging proxy Goth companion Katy Bell comes to a sticky end. Sixie's verbosity works well in this adventure but it reminds me a little of Hammer's The Witches crossed with the Archers. The satirical tone is rather jarring.
Day of the Vashta Nerada by Matt Fitton bookends the set with the ravenous, shadowy swarm again, this time weaponised by Tamwar from Eastenders, on behalf of Jacqueline "Servalan" Pearce's cardinal Ollistra (from the War Doctor box sets). Paul McGann's reassuring, murmuring Eighth Doctor fails to save scientist Eva Morrison from the mutated Vashta Nerada in a downbeat ending.
This set improved as it went along. It's inessential but fairly entertaining. I do think going back to this particular well a third time is unlikely however.
Now, coming up in the next few weeks, probably, are posts on Star Trek in paperback; the tributes to Kirby on his 100th anniversary from DC and Marvel; The Second Doctor and Jamie; and maybe the Legion of Super-Heroes. Stay tuned.
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