Thursday 31 May 2018

The New Target Books

The old Target Books are publications of true beauty. I was never as attached to them as fans of a certain age. I could watch the TV stories on VHS or UK Gold and in my teens didn’t really see the point of re-living a story by spending hours reading a book I knew the ending to. However, the artwork I was always thrilled by and amassed quite a collection from second-hand shops in my youth. I read a good deal of them in my twenties and it remains a giddy thrill when I spot one in a car boot or jumble sale that isn’t already proudly displayed on my bookshelves. I am just old enough to remember seeing a brand-new copy of The Space Pirates in WHSmiths (one of the last to be published) and thinking how wonderful a story it looked. That there, in microcosm, is the power of the Target.

For years now, a section of fandom has clamoured for re-tellings of the New Series in Target book form. I was always convinced that new fiction was the way forward. Having read the four new editions over the last month, however, I’ve completely changed my mind. They are glorious, beautiful and utterly worthy of the Target title. I so hope that more are on their way!
TWICE UPON A TIME
I started with Paul Cornell’s novelisation of the most recent Christmas special. The story was the freshest in my mind and, despite featuring my beloved Capaldi, it was the book I was the least excited by. More fool me. 
Paul Cornell has clearly set out to emulate the master, the great Terrance Dicks. He manages to do so with utter aplomb. There is something so familiar, so re-assuring about Twice Upon a Time, that one feels like they’ve known the story inside-out a good deal longer than is practically possible. Cornell also deals with a few scripting niggles: he explains why the First Doctor is so uncharacteristically outrageous in terms of his sexism. He explains how he can pilot the TARDIS back to World War One (I expect this information was edited from the finished programme) and unpeels the reasons why the Twelfth Doctor is so keen not to regenerate. The book is thrillingly easy to read, with clear, cut-throat prose, perfectly reminiscent of those early 160-page dazzlers. To be compared to Terrance Dicks I’m sure Paul Cornell would consider very high praise. To suggest that he is on par with the man I hope would make him very happy indeed, just as his re-telling of this odd, little gem of a story made me.
ROSE
If Paul Cornell is the Terrance Dicks of the Target world, then Russell T Davies proves to be a very welcome substitute for Malcolm Hulke. Rose deviates from the TV episode on which it was based with some sketching of characters and new scenes featuring Mickey’s housemates, just as Hulke had shaded in backgrounds for the IMC people and the future world of The Doomsday Weapon. Truth be told, Rose had a very specific agenda in 2005: it had to re-introduce Doctor Who to the masses in a slick, swift and vibrant way. It was written, more than any other episode up to that point, for Saturday night, prime time television. As such, the plot is very, very slight. It is not honestly very good book material. Davies’s flourishes whilst full of heart and character serve to slacken the pace and at times, getting to the end of the book feels like an uphill struggle. Take the first chapter on Wilson: in its own right, it’s a perfectly lovely opening with lots of emotional shades. In truth though, it doesn’t help propel the story onwards or even have very much to do with anything that follows. Mac Hulke managed to tell the life of Shughie McPherson in the first few pages of The Dinosaur Invasion  whilst thrillingly engaging him in the plot. Similar passages by Davies later in the novel end up brining proceedings to a grinding halt. Even the scenes in Clive’s shed, whilst including a few fannish nods, is longer than it needs to be. A straight re-telling would probably only last 100 pages but it might have been more energetic and that’s something Davies’s novelisation lacks, despite its very strong character work.
THE CHRISTMAS INVASION
Somewhere betwixt Cornell and Davies, comes Jenny T Colgan. Perhaps unusually, for a story that quite brazenly shouts RUSSELL T DAVIES at us in terms of content, Colgan manages to allow her own narrative voice to come through. There are small turns of phrases which are quite, quite beautiful and lift the prose from the page like only a natural novelist could. Despite these ornamental touches, the text breezes by with pace and efficiency. There is an unexpected sub-plot between Llewellyn and Sally which adds a bittersweet romantic weight to their scenes together and works wonderfully. New subsidiary characters also help bring this world to life. It is in the exploration of Rose, however, where Colgan really cements her credentials. This is her story from Page One. It is a very canny move for Colgan to start with the Children in Need post-regeneration scene to really cement Rose’s ambivalence towards her fresh-faced Doctor substitute and the last few pages are made yet more beautiful thanks to this early character work. If all future novels were as good as The Christmas Invasion, then they’d be very, very welcome. 
THE DAY OF THE DOCTOR
Steven Moffat sets himself up as the Donald Cotton of the new Target authors. This version of The Day of the Doctor is not a re-telling of the TV episode at all; it is a novel in its own right. He has clearly set out to write the ultimate Doctor Who story and sod everybody else. It starts with Paul McGann and ends with Jodie Whittaker, encompassing Doctors-past having adventures, saving the children of Gallifrey. The framing device is a masterstroke and keenly engages the reader by inviting them to solve the book’s secrets. The chapters themselves work brilliantly, contrasting each vividly different event from the episode against the next. Whilst the TV story sags a little as we reach Tudor England, here Moffat chooses to tell the tale from three perspectives, giving us new takes on familiar scenes. The Brigadier’s in it. River Song’s in it. It is a book filled to the brim with all the things that make Doctor Who so special. It is not a remotely contentious thing to say that this is perhaps the best Doctor Who fiction ever published. Even after his time on the programme, Steven Moffat delivers his final magnum opus. I applaud you, Sir!
And so what’s next? Hopefully, we’ll get another batch. They’re clearly selling very well. All four novels sing. I was surprised to find Russell T Davies’s my least favourite but then again, if a novel written by Russell T Davies is a least favourite, surely that says more about the grand quality of his associates than it does about Rose? And to have a book as powerful, intricate, beautiful and clever as The Day of the Doctor, is utterly, cherishably joyous. Long may the Targets continue!
JH

Wednesday 23 May 2018

The Rise and Rise of Steven Moffat: Exhibit #1


The Empty Child
The Big Bang
The Bells of Saint John
 Heaven Sent
The Doctor Dances
A Christmas Carol
The Name of the Doctor
 Hell Bent
The Girl in the Fireplace
The Impossible Astronaut
The Day of the Doctor
The Husbands of River Song
Blink
Day of the Moon
The Time of the Doctor
The Return of Doctor Mysterio
Silence in the Library
A Good Man Goes to War
Deep Breath
The Pilot
Forest of the Dead
Let’s Kill Hitler
Listen
Extremis
The Eleventh Hour
The Wedding of River Song
Dark Water
World Enough and Time
The Beast Below
The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe
Death in Heaven
The Doctor Falls
The Time of Angels
Asylum of the Daleks
Last Christmas
Twice Upon a Time
Flesh and Stone
The Angels Take Manhattan
The Magician’s Apprentice

The Pandorica Opens
The Snowmen
The Witch’s Familiar

Steven Moffat has generated a vast amount of Doctor Who output. The list above details the episodes for which he receives a sole credit. There are also episodes such as Into the Dalek, Time Heist, The Caretaker, The Girl Who Died, The Zygon Inversion and The Pyramid at the End of the World for which he receives a co-writing credit. It’s also hardly a state secret that he rewrote fan-favourites Vincent and the Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife – virtually page one rewrites, uncredited. This is a man who has written more Doctor Who than Robert Holmes and arguably, perhaps contentiously, far less bilge. (All of these scripts are leagues in advance of Pyramids of Mars. I LOVE Pyramids of Mars but it doesn’t stop it being very badly plotted and Part Four is a right old mess.) Is it any wonder though that, given the longevity of his tenure, that Steven Moffat, once the fans’ golden boy who gave us The Empty Child would be viewed by those self-same fans as That Man What Wrecked Our Doctor Who. 
Of the above list, I can spot only three episodes I dislike. Two of those I dislike for directorial reasons. One I dislike because of the writing. Even when Moffat is at his wits’ end (during the well-documented turbulence that was Series 7B) he hits the mark with The Bells of Saint John and The Name of the Doctor, before knocking it out of the ballpark with The Day of the Doctor a few months later and majestically putting the cherry on top of all that icing with The Time of the Doctor.
Let’s take a look at The Moffat Era - as it were - and try to catalogue its creatively tumultuous journey to gain a better insight into quite why a section of fandom turned on the man and quite why I am still deeply in love with this stupendously clever writer.
Chapter One – The RTD Years
When the list of writers for Series 1 was announced in Doctor Who Magazine, I remember being thrilled by the choices of Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell and Robert Shearman. I’d adored their Big Finish output and long heard older fans wax lyrical about the quality of their books. The only name I failed to recognise was that of the curly-haired, crab-eyed Steven Moffat (pictured). What the hell did he have to do with our programme? And, wait, what, he had two episodes! The others had one apiece and this geezer gets two?! I read the article to discover he’d written the – admittedly achingly funny – skit for Comic Relief and begrudgingly accepted that he’d most probably be as good as the others. I mean, Russell T Davies had made the call and from everything I knew and was discovering about him, he seemed pretty decent.
Along came the series. RTD was a bit more than pretty decent. Mark Gatiss and Robert Shearman were Good But Not As Good As They Were At Big Finish. Paul Cornell was amazing – fresh, breezy, heartrending. Steven Moffat, though, Jesus… He could make CLASSIC Doctor Who. Old School Classic Series, complete with darkness, body-horror, running, all the things we thought “Good Doctor Who” was (but had never really managed before). And he also delivered the happiest ending of all time. The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances were and are totemic examples of our programme. They are traditional yet far better than anything we’d ever had before. They sing. They inspire. If there were any man we wanted writing Doctor Who again, it was Steven Moffat.
And yet… If you read the introduction to The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances in the shooting script book, Moffat admits that there was once a time travel plot involving the German bomb and a time loop inside which Captain Jack could trap the thing. It was RTD who told him wisely to simplify the script, tone it down and deliver something less like a head-f**k. In helping streamline the script, RTD must take some credit for its success.
The Girl in the Fireplace felt a little less spectacular. We were expecting another Empty Child. We got a time travel love story instead. Yes, there were scares too: the monsters hiding under the bed is typical of Moffat’s childhood chills approach to the programme. But the majority of this episode is a beautifully woven tale of heartbreak. It's aged very well and on its own merits, can be counted as something unusual, strange and very, very special.
Blink came next. Or should that be What I Did on My Summer Holidays By Sally Sparrow. Yes, Moffat had already written this story a few years before in the Doctor Who Annual, even down to the video messages and the writing on the wallpaper. He then shamelessly recycled it here! What thrilled us here though were the insanely good monsters: the weeping angels quite rightly became a series icon and provided scares aplenty from here on in.
Finally, Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead proved to be Moffat’s most complicated scripting job yet. Again, the scripts formed a time travel love story with a scary monster thrown in for good measure. But this was a new kind of complexity for the show. The first scene we see is the little girl’s dream wherein she meets the Doctor and Donna. Next, we see the Doctor and Donna arrive in the library and meet what we know to be the little girl. Scenes are told from different perspectives thusly, the Doctor and River’s story back to front and Donna’s story is chopped up in the editing room, the bizarre jump-cuts becoming a part of the narrative itself. Later, Moffat would employ similar techniques to wrong-foot the viewers (see his out-of-order/different perspective scenes in The Big Bang). Silence in the Library was a story that didn’t tickle the fan muscles quite so much as something as traditional as The Empty Child but up to that point, it was perhaps the most layered, complicated and ambitious of Doctor Who stories. Even at the time, there were a select few bemoaning the fact that the story was perhaps too complicated for “the casual viewer.”
And then, gloriously, he was the head writer, the chief exec, the man in charge.
So what did we expect? Looking back on his stories, we longed for the show to go in the dark direction of The Empty Child and those early scenes in The Girl in the Fireplace. We longed for monsters as iconoclastic as the weeping angels. We saw Steven Moffat as the perfect man to take over our show.
Perhaps what we didn’t consider – that those who now complain about Moffat’s tenure should have considered – is that those four tales represent everything that he has done since. There are three time travel love stories (Reinette and the Doctor, River and the Doctor, Sally and Larry). Get that: in two of only four stories, the Doctor is in love! There are over-complications: Series 6 anyone? There are recycled ideas: under the bed, nursery rhymes, don’t blink, breathe or think. Moffat would go on to tell the biggest time travel love story of all time in extending River’s epic journey over the next five years. It was all there. Even the library tale is a re-telling of a Virgin short story. Moffat now openly admits he’s used every idea he ever had at least twice. So in all seriousness, the signs of what was to come were laid out for us all to see. And like most Steven Moffat scripts, what disappointed us most of all in the future, was that he didn’t do quite what we expected him. 
He did something arguably far, far better.
To Be Continued…
JH

Friday 18 May 2018

Torchwood: Believe

What is it with Torchwood? It’s the spin-off that just won’t die. After two niche stylistically and tonally awkward seasons on BBC3 and then 2 respectively, we had a blistering 5-part season “stripped” across weeknights on BBC One, followed by a fairly silly, often tedious 10-part American epic. The iterations of the programme on TV were massively inconsistent, even across seasons. Episode lengths varied, we had 1,2,5 and 10 parters. This was a programme that was never quite comfortable with what it wanted to be. It could only be identified by its very Welsh bent, Eve Myles and John Barrowman beautifully overacting, immature adult content and a fairly loose grip on reality.

Big Finish have adopted a similarly sporadic approach to their Torchwood tales: there are monthly one parters, two handers, 12-part full-cast epics, 3-part pre-Torchwood boxsets, an anniversary special set thousands of years in the future, and two 3-part full-cast “stripped” stories. The only difference between the adventures produced by the BBC and those produced by Big Finish are that, by and large, the Big Finish stories are absolutely phenomenal. Apart from perhaps, Children of Earth, the Big Finish output eclipses its mother-programme in terms of immature adult content, vivid imagination and ambitious horizons. Also, you almost don’t notice John Barrowman and Eve Myles doing their beautiful over-acting thing. Almost don’t notice.
Believe is a 3-part full-cast drama with a difference: all the original cast are back. Well, actually, that’s how it’s been marketed but the group don’t actually spend a large amount of time together and the actors were clearly scheduled around each other. It must have been a nightmare: The Five Doctors of the Torchwood world. Having said that, it is a bit of a giddy thrill to have them all back together and the early scenes in the hub really feel like stepping back in time.
Surprisingly though, the story doesn’t really feel much like one from 2006/7. For a start, it’s a 3-parter and it’s also far less melodramatic, on-the-nose and rough-around-the-edges than early Torchwood. It’s as if the original Torchwood viewers have grown up, become writers and written new episodes as their younger minds imagined it used to be. Guy Adams’s scripts are excellent. The threat here is one posed by the human race and feels far more dangerous and insidious than any alien threat, especially given that the aggressors target the weak and the lonely. This is Torchwood at perhaps its most mature.
Burn Gorman and Naoko Mori stand out specifically amongst the cast and are given the best scenes. There is a bitterness between Owen and Tosh, given the genuinely uncomfortable events of Episode One, which culminates in a terrifically – and characteristically – clumsy conversation in the final instalment which is completely riveting. This is as real and vivid and painful as their relationship has ever been. There’s a star turn from Arthur Darvill here too which is definitely worthy of note, playing against type and leaving a stark and loathsome impression.
Episode Two focuses on Ianto and again, he is given some terrifically uncomfortable scenes. We fear that he is not a million miles away from the victims of the church with whom he is trying to infiltrate and so there is a more tangible sense of threat posed towards him than perhaps our other leads. 
The final episode ends quietly, in a series of stages, which is indicative of the way Guy Adams goes not for spectacle but for heart in the telling of Believe. It doesn’t need to flex its muscles as much as other Torchwood episodes (and feels comparatively straight judged alongside them) because Believe’s greatest strength is its confidence: it knows it doesn’t have to be showy to be tremendous. For once, this Torchwood episode could happily call itself brilliantly subtle. All told, Believe is a triumph.
9/10
JH

Tuesday 1 May 2018

Big Finish: The David Tennant Boxsets



It goes without saying that David Tennant’s return to Big Finish as the Doctor is an absolute triumph, not just for the company but for Doctor Who in general. The fact that one of the busiest and most beloved actors in the country still wants to be a part of our little show is very special and a testament to all that is wonderful and kind and magical about the programme.
Big Finish have deployed some of their finest writers to script these six (so far) tales and some of the strongest actors in what could be called their little repertory: John Banks, Beth Chalmers, Terry Molloy and Dan Starkey, as well as some famous names from British TV, film and stage: Nikolas Grace, Rachael Stirling, Niky Wardley and Sean Biggerstaff. 
So why aren’t the stories working for me?
Before I continue, it feels extremely churlish to criticise a series of plays made with such obvious love for the period, made with such effort to get those character voices right and made with the clear intent of making those actors (or should I say stars?) and the audience feel as if they are right back there in 2006/8. There is no doubt in my mind that absolutely everyone involved in the production of these plays completely loves the era and is doing their damnedest to make these audio dramas as successful as they can possibly be.
The truth is, and there’s no easy way of saying this, they just feel like the other Big Finish plays. That is not to say that they are poor stories. Far from it: quite miraculously given the size of it, the vast majority of Big Finish’s output is absolutely fantastic. In fact, there were periods when I looked forward to the Big Finish monthly CD more excitedly than the next TV episode. So the production values are as strong as ever, the scripts as tight as ever and the performances as high-octane and inspirational as ever. But these Tennant sets aren’t doing anything differently and they’re missing some vital touches to truly epitomise the era from which they are born.
Firstly, from a purely technical and perhaps superficial point of view, Murray Gold’s music is missing. It seems like a tiny thing, but Gold’s scores were at the very core of what made the Tennant years so great. The huge, theatrical, operatic sweeping sounds dragged the viewers through those tales and the themes resonated long after the episodes had finished. Try as he might, Howard Carter simply cannot hope to emulate such majesty. On occasion he gets close: the opening ten minutes of Sword of the Chevalier feel rip-roaring in the best possible way. (Coincidentally, they’re also ten minutes of the best Doctor/Rose written interplay on offer from the company. Perhaps Carter takes his cues from the scripts?) For the most part, though, the scores are generic and despite being able to listen in isolation at the end of each story’s disc, nothing sticks in the memory. This music, in any other Big Finish play, would be perfectly acceptable – terrific even – but here it’s in competition with Murray and sadly, it lags behind.
Secondly, there’s a problem of nuance. The bold, story-as-headline approach which characterised the Russell T Davies years is not quite so much in evidence here. On TV we had AGATHA CHRISTIE; DALEKS IN MANHATTAN; UP POMPEII!; WEREWOLF AND QUEEN VICTORIA; THE END OF THE UNIVERSE AND SHAKESPEARE! Here, we have SOME ELECTRONICS DO THINGS; AN ALMOST BUT NOT QUITE INVASION OF NORWICH; A SPACE GARAGE and DONNA IN A WEIRD, MEDIEVAL WORLD. The headlines don’t quite meet the boldness of their TV counterparts. The closest is THE ICE WARRIORS IN THE FREEZER and THE THREE-FACED MAN AND THE CHEVALIER. They come with caveats though: The Chevalier is hardly a well-known, popular historical figure. One might argue that nor was Madame De Pompadour but The Girl in the Fireplace was also the story of THE CLOCKWORK MEN. Cold Vengeance is, to my mind, the closest the audios get to feeling truly like the Tennant years: there’s a no-nonsense, get-to-the-point pre-titles sequence, a monster to match the setting and a bin-lady who discovers herself in time to save the world. But even then, that’s about it: the story is essentially a run-around in a freezer, with a messily-shaped narrative ending with the Ice Lord in the TARDIS, the sort of ending only Boom Town in all its wonderful weirdness was able to deploy (and even that was set-up or the finale). The Doctor and Rose are not really given an awful lot to do either. In Cold Vengeance, Rose tells the bin-lady how unique and special she is, just as she told Beth in Infamy of the Zaross how unique and special she was only two stories earlier - and they are the stand-out moments of the entire set for Billie Piper. I can’t actually bring to mind a stand-out moment for David Tennant (aside from perhaps his entrance in Death and the Queen) and Russell T Davies always played him centre forward. Basically, these sets could just as easily be an entry in a Classic Monsters, New Doctors range insomuch as it feels like a Big Finish amalgam rather than New Series in terms of its plot, form and characterisation.
Perhaps the stories are too long. There is maybe too much plot given the hour’s longevity for the tales to feel as taut and focussed as the New Series 45-minuters. I can imagine a much stronger version of Cold Vengeance without the hiding in a bin bit and a simpler approach to the planetary war. I can imagine a Sword of the Chevalier without the travel sequence from countryside to town. The zippiness of the TV series is lost on audio, the scenes and plays themselves being generally 25% longer. It almost feels like I’m watching a what-could-have-been-less-successful version of the TV show. It’s like Charlie Higson’s Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) – all the pieces for a terrific series were there but they just weren’t quite bold or direct enough with a section that’s “a bit boring in the middle.”
In short, whilst these writers have produced works of incredible skill and made a tremendous impression at Big Finish, here they’re in direct competition with Russell T Davies and they just aren’t him. Infamy of the Zaross - a title I can never imagine RTD going with by the way (see also Time Reaver) – is essentially a neater version of John Dorney’s own The Fourth Wall. But The Fourth Wall was a four-part Colin Baker story and better. (Just as Jubilee, the four-part Colin Baker Dalek story was so much better than the TV series’s Dalek.) It’s not enough to graft a Big Finish plot onto the RTD format. What Big Finish really need to do is play out of their comfort zone and go for broke. Be bolder about the decisions they make. These are great writers who can be pushed even further. Let them, and the stories and indeed David Tennant, fly a little higher. Give us bolder headlines: QUEEN NEFERTITI AND THE MUMMY’S TOMB; HENRY VIII AND THE ROBOT PRIEST; THE HIDDEN RELICS OF THE JUNGLE TEMPLE – STARRING RIVER SONG. You get the idea.
If a listener is new to Big Finish – and I’m delighted to say I introduced a friend to the company just last month and he’s since bought eight plays! They do exist! – then I’m certain these Tennant stories would prove just the ticket. Big Finish’s ability to capture an atmosphere and the quality of the performances alone are breathtakingly good. They don’t even compare to BBC Radio plays. They’re immersive, like movies without pictures. But they’ve been like that since the beginning. It’s what us long term devotees have come to expect. From a New Series boxset, I’d like to see the game upped even further. I want to see the Doctor and Rose jump straight into another bold adventure and finish a CD without realising I’ve been holding my breath.
I don't want to end on a lacklustre note. There is, of course, plenty to enjoy in these CDs. There has to be with such a stellar team of writers and actors. But hopefully, next time David Tennant is free, Big Finish can do something a little bit scarier, a little bit edgier, a little bit more fun and just that little bit bigger. With RTD to contend with, one can only be bold.
JH