Cosmic How-Much

Now that I'm settling back into life in Moray again, after my wrong-headed and unproductive sabbatical in suburbia, I'm listening to audio on the walk to work, across the playing fields and the very busy road to Forres and Inverness.

Some vandalism last year

Earlier this month, I caught up with the Second Doctor Companion Chronicles box set from June 2016. These are audiobooks performed by a smaller cast than the usual Main Range of box set Big Finish plays. This one focuses on Jamie McCrimmon, the long-serving Highlander companion from Patrick Troughton's era and is comprised of four stories.

The Mouthless Dead features  Frazer Hines, Anneke Wills as Polly and Elliot Chapman as Ben, the part originally played by Michael Craze. It's an emotional World War One adventure which reminded me of the legendary railway station Sapphire and Steel adventure. A ghost story with pathos and charm, Jamie actually makes less of an impact in this episode than the latter pair.


The Story of Extinction features the late Deboarh Watling and a cameo role for Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor. It's the most inventive story, about the attack on a colony world by a sentient story. Its melancholy nature gains effect from the very recent passing of Miss Watling.


The Integral was the least successful story for my money: I found it confusing and slow. It guest stars Wendy Padbury as Zoe in a base under siege from an enigmatic alien race.


The Edge is a more action-packed adventure for Jamie on a scientific facility where a madness plague has broken out. Wendy Padbury features in this episode too.
The box is entertaining enough, even if the second half is less memorable than the first. It's always a pleasure to hear Frazer Hines' impression of the Second Doctor but I'm not in a great hurry to hear the second collection of First Doctor CCs.

I also listened to two more CCs from the Jon Pertwee era. The Last Post by James Goss is a story which features Liz Shaw, the Third Doctor's brainy, academic assistant in 1970. When I re-watched all of Season Seven about a decade ago, I though Liz was better classed as a supporting character, rather than a Companion, like the rest of UNIT. This story is also a continuity fest, drawing upon all the adventures in the seventh season. Despite these obstacles, it has pace and charm, told as a series of letters between Liz and her donnish mum, who also appears in Tom Baker's Cloisters of Terror, from 2015. Ten out of ten Talmars: the relationship between the late Carrie John and Rowena Cooper is very believable and the threads of  very early 70s tv adventures are tied very logically and deftly.

Finally, Ghost in the Machine by Jonathan Morris stars Katy Manning's beloved Jo Grant, the first companion I cared about as a kid. A claustrophobic and genuinely creepy ghost story, it makes fantastic use of the audio medium through the device of the Tardis voice recorder and another type of monster specific to BF: the creature made of sound or living in language. Katy displays her versatility when she drops her Jo voice to use her own richer tones for the creature. Ten out of Ten Talmars again for a moody, scary listen in autumn morning woods.




I've also been listening to audiobook adaptations of  Fleming's Bond novels, read by Rufus Sewell. I read Live and Let Die, From Russia...Goldfinger and Dr. No a couple of summers ago and when I moved back here, remembered I had acquired a couple more, remaindered from the school library. These are Moonraker, which I had a vague recollection of trying to read as a secondary school pupil and The Man With The Golden Gun. But my earliest memories of Bond are the 70s Horak strips in the Daily Express, alongside the spicy space adventures of Jeff Hawke.

Both audiobooks are extremely listenable. Fleming's prose is very descriptive and memorable, from Moonraker's exciting and deadly car chase to the icy self-confidence of the hit-man Scaramanga. I'm disappointed not to have more readings from other novels I haven't read, like The Spy Who Loved Me for instance. Instead, I've just picked up a paperback collection of the short stories.


In future posts, I'm still thinking about the anniversary of Mighty World of Marvel and the Star Trek novels of Blish and Dean Foster. Plus Mr. Miracle and the West Coast Avengers.


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