UNIT: Cyber-Reality

The new UNIT series has now clocked up a full 24 hours of drama. Its sixth box set presents us with an infiltration by the Cybermen of our reality and an advancement of the growing threat posed by the mysterious Auctioneers. The UNIT series has so far been a peculiar one. It is hardly Big Finish’s finest achievement, despite the absconding of Jemma Redgrave and Ingrid Oliver from the TV series over to the audio world and a team set-up that most blockbusters would die for. Despite some irresistible gimmicks (Old UNIT vs New UNIT/an Auton invasion via 3-d printers) the stories have not yet really taken off. Only in Silenced did the potential of the UNIT format really shine. Silenced was a political thriller, genuinely scary and ambitious in terms of its story structure and presentation with rich characters and a real sense of global threat. Above all, it felt vividly relevant.

Sadly, Cyber-Reality is another step backwards. The main problem with UNIT is that it is not really sure what sort of a series it wants to be. Is it action-adventure, political thriller, sci-fi, character drama or none of the above? It often tries to be all of them at once and fails at conveying any approach successfully. There is no winning formula for a UNIT story, in the same way that there is most definitely for a Counter-Measures or Jago & Litefoot tale. (We’d start in Sir Toby’s office or the Red Tavern where the regulars would be greeted with some new mystery to solve, for example.) After 24 hours of UNIT, I’m still not sure what to expect of a typical episode, other than Kate Stewart being badass and Osgood being technical. The fifth boxset decided for the first time to tell stand-alone stories so perhaps the series is still finding its feet. I’m not sure what the other regular characters do other than offer cannon fodder we know will never see the front line. James Joyce plays a nondescript Captain Josh Carter (whose name even after a full day’s worth of listening I had to look up on the Big Finish website). I’m not even sure I’d recognise Joyce’s voice if I heard it in a different production, so utterly nothing is his character. Warren Brown plays hardman Sam Bishop, a character who really should be Mr Charisma, the James Bond of the pack. Unfortunately, he’s played by Warren Brown, an actor more wooden than Sweden. The only other regular of note is Ramon Tikaram’s Colonel Shindi who offers at the most a re-assuring presence, Tikaram putting in a solid, distinguished performance. One of these three characters has an auton body but I’m not sure which, so irrelevant has that particular sub-plot become. It has to be said, Jemma Redgrave herself is not the most versatile actor, but her performance in this sixth series is markedly better than those before: in Code Silver she is desperate and vengeful and a force to be reckoned with. Ingrid Oliver is reliably consistent as Osgood but Osgood is by no means a second lead; at best she’s a techie. 

Please be advised, SPOILERS follow.

To be fair, the opening episode of Cyber-Reality does pack a punch. Matt Fitton opens with a thrilling pre-titles sequence, diving straight into the peril and promising a rip-roaring yarn. The following hour is indeed tremendously exciting, with Kate and Osgood suddenly in the hands of an unknown captor, given orders and time limits to complete dangerous tasks. Sam Bishop is also all at sea for want of a better pun. He’s repeating the same set of events over and over again, every time discovering his whereabouts in the Bermuda Triangle. This is an unnerving adventure which calls into question the nature of the realities we are hearing and the best the boxset has to offer by a mile, ironic considering that there are no Cybermen and no Master to be heard. It also sets up the very real threat the Auctioneers pose as this series’ big bad. However, their agenda is ultimately and simply to scare UNIT away and by the end of the boxset they are no longer very threatening at all.

Guy Adams continues apace into Telepresence. At its heart, there is a strong idea here: entry into another universe via VR headsets, but with the added caveat that death in the VR world could well mean death back home. For the most part, this is a thrilling tale, with each action set piece coming swiftly on top of the one before. The only trouble is, even after 5 box sets, the regular characters are still in no way relatable. I don’t know who Colonel Shindi or Josh Carter are, so the tale ends up feeling only superficially exciting without a genuine sense of jeopardy. Even on their journey across a parallel war-torn London, we don’t learn a thing about them. Only in the aforementioned Silenced do we see the characters outside of their UNIT roles and they seem so much more alive and interesting. Here was a golden opportunity to get to know them and they’re busy imagining they can jump really far.

Sadly, things then take a complete nosedive. The third episode is a chore to get through. It does allow Jemma Redgrave a starring role (for the first time perhaps feeling like a worthy replacement for Sir Alistair) but the narrative is overcomplicated, overtechnical and to be honest, very dull. Nick Briggs’s Cyber voice is a weird mix of Tenth Planet and Nightmare in Silver and becomes very annoying very quickly given the vast amount of curiously emotive Cyber dialogue.  There is no real sense of place and the scenes become difficult to imagine. For all its technicality, the plot boils down to: the Cybermen are coming so Kate finds a big gun.

This is exacerbated in Matt Fitton’s finale, Master of Worlds, in which (SPOILERS) the Master turns up and saves the day because he wants to find his TARDIS. It’s that crass. Since Dark Eyes 3, I’ve been unconvinced by Matt Fitton’s ability to write dialogue for the Master. At the best of times, his general dialogue is workmanlike rather than imaginative, but his Master’s voice, as it were, is childish, petulant and sarcastic, lacking any genuine wit. As a result, Derek Jacobi ends up sounding more like his bitchy Stuart Bixby from Vicious than the Gallifreyan King of Evil. At one point, Kate snarkily remarks that all her soldiers earned their respective titles. He jibes back with, “Could you say the same of the Doctor?” Even without the presence of his nemesis, this Master can’t help but get his handbag out for him at dawn. The story goes from one nondescript location to another, finally ending up on the Sea Base Fort from The Sea Devils which UNIT had absolutely no involvement with whatsoever, not that it makes a difference. One shouty, noisy scene bleeds into the next until finally the Master switches the story off.

It’s always been a bit of a fan myth that Cybermen can’t choose a decent plot. To a degree one could argue that were true, but Cyber-Reality does nothing but add fuel to that argument. Once the Cybes turns up, you might as well stop listening.

Overall: 4/10

JH

The Fourth Doctor Adventures: Series 7 - Part Two

The first half of Tom Baker’s Series 7 back in January was a roaring success. Does the second half, featuring Sutekh the Destroyer, the late Keith Barron and a London made from cardboard houses, come close to matching it? The answer, despite the absence of K9, is a resounding affirmative.

The first story, Justin Richards’s The Shadow of London, begins in a slightly unremarkable way. The very title gives away the fact that we are somewhere else entirely and the revelation that this is not London at all comes almost at the precise mid-point of the narrative. This gives the first episode a languorous tone and the listener begins to feel they are being given clues to a mystery they have already solved. However, the revelation of the story’s precise location and the genesis of the monstrous creature hunting the TARDIS team are huge surprises and make up entirely for the first episode’s seeming lack of purpose. Richards was playing a much more elaborate game and the clues in the first half begin to pay off hugely. In fact, the revelations mean the story positively begs to be heard a second time. Quite often, I find Justin Richards’s scripts workmanlike affairs (The Darkness of Glass and The Beast of Kravenos were unsurprising and run-of-the-mill), after the great heights of Big Finish’s early days when he produced the astonishing Whispers of Terror and the criminally under-rated Red Dawn. Here, he shows the same deftness and cleverness prevalent in his early work and The Shadow of London, whilst not Richards’s masterpiece, feels satisfying and strong.

The Bad Penny from the pen of Dan Starkey is a curious affair. So unconnected with the rest of the Who world and so off-kilter its characters, the story begins to feel like it could be straight from a 70s annual. Its uniqueness makes the story memorable, as well as a final fruity turn from Keith Barron in multiple roles. The narrative structure is interesting – twisting off in various directions. Unlike The Shadow of London, however, the twists are fairly easy to predict. SPOILERS: The nature of Mr Tulip’s benefactor is obvious as soon as we enter timey-wimey territory. We see the Doctor in a mirror in Part One and know we have to revisit the moment again in Part Two. The inevitability of the second half means that it feels a little like marking time before reaching a preordained finish and in that respect the story falters.

Finally, we have Kill the Doctor! and The Age of Sutekh, two-disc season finale by Guy Adams and it’s a corker. Alongside January’s The Mind Runners and The Demon Rises, these tales represent 4-episode, future-world type stories common in the later years of Tom Baker’s television reign. They come from the same stable as The Sun Makers, The Armageddon Factor and The Pirate Planet, the sort of Blakes’ 7-y slate-metal-grey industrial zones of BBC sci-fi. In terms of pace, energy and structure they emulate the era extremely well. In fact, they cherry pick all the best bits, producing something that actually betters the TV stablemates. If the The Mind Runners and The Age of Sutekh were TV episodes, they’d be heralded as classics.

Kill the Doctor! starts with Tom Baker and Louise Jameson being brilliant on an unusual planet. It’s still quite wondrous that we repeatedly get to hear these two incredible leading performances bouncing off one another. We really are spoiled. I suspect we have years’ worth of Tom adventures backed up at Big Finish – a theory that excites me enormously. The story has a tiny cast but this serves to streamline the narrative, telling an epic story from more intimate viewpoints. Leela is given the chance to rebel and be wonderful. Tom flies around on a space bike as the city residents chant “Kill the Doctor!” If the story has any failing, it’s that the chanting almost, almost becomes wearying. This is as classic era Tom Baker as it gets.

The Age of Sutekh changes emphases. Problems are now planet-wide but wisely Guy Adams again chooses to follow his three guest characters in their insurgency on Sutekh’s new world. The mid-way cliff-hanger is a punch-the-air valedictory moment and enables us to race into an excellent final episode which wraps things up in clever ways which, like the best endings, prove unpredictable yet inevitable: Leela’s promise to the locals is played out, Sutekh – again blissfully voiced by Gabriel Woolf – is hoist by his own petard and the otherwise compromised Rania Chuma is allowed her moment of vengeance. This epic of an adventure ends the series on an incredibly high bar and leaves the listener in eager anticipation of Series 8 and a new companion.

Overall, with only The Bad Penny letting the side down: 8/10

Addendum

For the first time this year, The Fourth Doctor Adventures have been released in two batches. This is wonderful news for my wallet and one I’m extremely grateful for. (Last year, 9 adventures cost £75. This year, 8 adventures cost £45.) However, both have contained 2 one-part stories and a two-parter. This gives the sets a feeling of being bottom-heavy and unbalanced, the two one-parters in danger of looking like precursors to the main event later on. Ravenous last month felt similar, as if the two opening instalments were a bit of fluff before the real deal stuff at the end. Thankfully, next year’s Tom stories are being released a month apart and this should definitely alleviate the problem.

It has to be said though, that despite the Big Finish team going with the “1977 all over again” tagline, 2-episode stories actually feel nothing like 1977. The real gold of The Fourth Doctor Adventures have been the 4-parters: above I mentioned January’s The Mind Runners and The Demon Rises, as well as the superlative Kill the Doctor! and The Age of Sutekh. Elsewhere in the range, The Dalek Contract/The Final Phase, The Paradox Planet/Legacy of Death, Trail of the White Worm/The Oseidon Adventure and The Skin of the Sleek/The Thief who Stole Time feel like serious competition with the television series. The 4-episode novel adaptations and Philip Hinchcliffe offerings also feel like sprawling, heavyweight tales. The 2-parters have seemed a little slight, a little perfunctory on occasion and by comparison. (Which is not to say there haven’t been terrific 2-parters – I’m thinking The King of Sontar, White Ghosts, The Crooked Man and Last of the Colophon in particular!) David Richardson has promised that there is a definite movement towards 4-parters in the future though, and this sounds promising. For Tom Baker, the 4-part format just feels so right.

In the meantime, we can enjoy these incredibly strong Series 7 boxsets, which are the best Tom stories, in my view, since 2014. (A year that ironically didn’t have any 4-parters at all! - Am I talking jive?) For the record, if I were to order the season from top to bottom, it would be as such:

KILL THE DOCTOR!/THE AGE OF SUTEKH
THE CROWMARSH EXPERIMENT
THE MIND RUNNERS/THE DEMON RISES
THE SHADOW OF LONDON
THE BAD PENNY
THE SONS OF KALDOR

In January 2019, the Fourth Doctor meets Ann Kelso in The Syndicate Masterplan. And I cannot effing wait.

JH

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

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

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

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

Learning to Love: Planet of the Daleks

Everywhere I look – published reviews, online reviews, forums, polls - Planet of the Daleks seems to be greeted with a trifling shrug of the shoulders. I hear “It’s Terry Nation’s Greatest Hits” or “It looks cheap.” There are two things wrong with those statements: When did Terry Nation’s Greatest Hits become a bad thing? If it were, you might have chosen the wrong programme to hero-worship. And when did we start judging a Doctor Who story by how cheap it looks? Surely, that’s an instant write-off for the whole of the first 26 years and quite a bit of the Eccleston/Tennant eras these days too.

I watched Planet of the Daleks when I was 11. It was repeated weekly with those funny, little 5-minute documentaries beforehand. And it was bloody wonderful. It would be easy to say that I view the story with rose-tinted fan goggles but actually I am really quite good at disassociating myself from those initial reactions and seeing a story for what it really is. (Hello, Silver Nemesis, old friend.) Planet of the Daleks remains, to my eyes, bloody wonderful and as fans of Doctor Who and the Daleks we should all learn to love it. Here’s why:

Katy Manning IS Doctor Who! Episode One is Jo Grant’s story. In an unusual stylistic move, Jo Grant narrates the story to the viewer as she experiences it. Pertwee’s having a rest in the TARDIS cos he’s feeling a bit polystyrene. Most of Episode One works without dialogue. In that sense, it’s a traditional Terry Nation 6-pages-stretched-out-to-25-minutes but it’s gripping. Here, we really see Jo come into her own. She’s far removed from the ham-fisted bun vendor of Terror of the Autons a few years before. It also climaxes with the wonderfully camp idea that the Doctor forgot he was chasing Daleks and didn’t know he was in a story called Planet of the Daleks (and neither did we) and so ends the episode with a completely surprised and emphatically spat out cry of “Daleks!”

Episode Two is even better. The Doctor genuinely thinks Jo is dead and is quietly heartbroken, Pertwee’s performance becoming more understated. “They murdered her,” he tells Latep, bereft. It’s a subtle change, not brilliantly forecast by the script but Pertwee absolutely sells it. His pathetic screams as the Daleks gun down the Thal ship a few minutes earlier are genuinely horrifying. When the rescue craft arrives at the end of the instalment, Rebec’s revelation is so stunning in its specificity as to be utterly believable: 10,000 Daleks?! In accordance with His Elegance the Lord Pertwee, His Highness Bernard Horsfall goes for the subdued cliff-hanger acting approach and it pays off. 

The story continues apace. The action sequences are terrific. The climb up the shaft which ends Episode Three so excitingly and fuels the narrative for the first part of Episode Four looks splendid on film and stands out as one of the story’s most successful set-pieces. I love how Pertwee drops a few rungs down the spine of the shaft before grabbing hold, his driving-gloved hands those of an action man in his prime. It really is thrilling stuff. In fact, the end of Episode Three is a masterclass in the art of the cliff-hanger, scenes built upon sequentially and ending in as edge-of-your-seat fashion as can be imagined.

By Episode Six, Planet of the Daleks is delivering even more giddy thrills – an enormous golden Dalek to better the later Victory design; a cool spaceship that easily betters the one seen the following year in Death. At this stage, we can look back at the accumulation of thrills Terry Nation has presented us with and look on agog: ice volcanoes, space plagues, lift shafts, bombs, jungle nightlife, debilitating fungus, an underground army of Daleks, Rebec hiding inside a Dalek (never gets old), invisible Daleks, purple Spiridon cloaks, those weird laundry baskets with cargo nets over the top, Jo Grant’s blinggy fingers. Seriously, the fun never ends. 

The story does have its faults, admittedly. The Golden Boss Dalek’s lights don’t chime with its dialogue, Prentis Hancock is in it and there are so many Louis Marx Daleks as to be a little bit bloody obvious. The mix of videotape jungle to outdoor quarry is jarring but the jungle set Peter Grimwade would have died for on Kinda. There is enough exciting incident and character interplay for Planet of the Daleks to tear across the screen. It’s colourful, it’s broad, it’s comic book Doctor Who - but sometimes, that’s just how I want my Doctor Who to be. Planet of the Daleks rocks.

JH

Things That Make You Go "Ow."

Growing up in the 90s, it’s fair to say that being a Doctor Who fan was something of an embarrassing stigma. It was looked upon as old, cheap and more than a bit rubbish. We knew, of course, that it wasn’t. We knew how majestic and wonderful the very idea of the programme was and we knew how expansive was its imaginative reach. However, if we looked a little more truthfully at the show, without those fan goggles on (which tend to paper over the flimsy, gaudy visuals and critique plot points nobody in their right mind would worry about) we would perhaps, just perhaps realise that there were moments of our favourite show which didn’t stand up to any scrutiny at all.

I foolishly watched The Trial of a Time Lord with 4 university mates all in one night in 2004. At the end of the marathon, one mate said, “It was unwieldy, it was convoluted, it didn’t hang together at all.” Not once did he mention that Trial looked cheap, rather that it was just completely rubbish. After so many hours of the thing, I reluctantly had to agree. The other mates were too busy poking needles in their eyes to make comment. 

And yet, I can re-watch and re-watch Trial and find some good in it every single time. I love the music, I love Bob Holmes’s dialogue – far richer in Mysterious Planet than anybody gives it credit for. I love Mindwarp. I love the Part 12 cliff-hanger which throws the story on its head. I love the Master’s casual dropping in of the Valeyard’s real name. I love it. And yet, I can still see what a misguided thing it was to do to invite my mates to watch it. Because at its core, hand-on-heart, The Trial of a Time Lord is dreadful. There’s Colin Baker throwing witless insults at the Valeyard that an average four-year old could trump. (“Stackyard?”) There’s Brian Blessed and Nicola Bryant in super slo-mo inside a big, girly pink heart. There’s Pip and Jane Baker’s dialogue. There’s Joan Simms. “Forward I say!”

Moments of similarly toe-curling embarrassment abound in all of Doctor Who. Much has been written about Ingrid Pitt’s karate Myrka action, McCoy’s cliff-hanging icy umbrella antics, Sutekh’s special bottom feeler, the guy who plays Cotton in The Mutants and the entirety of Timelash. So I won’t bore you by making fun of a 30 year old science-fiction thriller made with minimal money in the same way as a soap opera. Instead, I’ll look at the post 2005 series – the BBC’s flagship programme made with a much larger budget, better resources, and the luxury of multiple takes – and see where this modern iteration of our beloved Doctor has stumbled and fallen. Which moments here already make us cringe? Which will be the moments in the future looked back upon as infamously as Ingrid Pitt’s karate Myrka action? Which moments will we and hang our heads in shame in reminiscence of, whilst all the while still loving the bones of our show?

When I think of embarrassing New Series moments, I am instantly reminded of Freema Agyeman’s delivery of her line at the start of The Sontaran Stratagem: “Doctor, it’s Martha and I’m bringing you back to Earth.” From a purely textual level, it’s a bit of a disaster. Who on Earth indeed would open a telephone conversation that way? The Doc’s been off travelling with Donna, Martha’s risen up the UNIT ranks: lots of time has passed. So how might two friends reconnect? What might the first thing they say be? Surely something more like, “Doctor, it’s Martha. How are you are getting on? … Yeah, I’m great thanks, working for UNIT actually, which sort of brings me to what I was ringing about. Can you do us a favour?” What we actually get is a ham-fisted slap-you-round-the-face-with-nothing line which rams home the idea that the Doctor is not spending this episode on a more interesting planet. Well, whoop-de-do. The fact that it’s positioned immediately before the titles is disappointing, as we’d just enjoyed a stellar sequence with a satnav and a death which would have made for far more of a jeopardy-fuelled hook into the episode. Lastly though, and perhaps worst of all, is Freema Agyeman’s delivery. “I’m bringing you back to Earth.” She stresses bringing?! Why would any actor stress bringing? What is it about bringing in the sentence that needs it marking out as important? “I’m bringing you back to Earth!” she positively exclaims. If there is a stronger example of a bad line being made even worse by a lead performance in the New Series, show me! The true gut-punch is that it was used in the Next Time Trailer in Planet of the Ood, and the Previously On Doctor Who at the beginning of The Poison Sky. So if you’re ever marathoning a series, you have to endure it three bloody times.

CGI had undergone a sea-change since 1989 when Doctor Who returned. It was a culture shock to see our nuts-and-bolts, do-it-yourself, sticky-back-plastic show affected by so much CGI. Platform One was particularly beautiful and strange. Satellite 5 was equally spectacular. And Daleks flying across space to attack it was a visual dream come true. But, it has to be said, lots of the CGI in Series One, even at the time, made us wince. My brother recently asked me if a particular piece of CGI was more or less impressive than “that shit wheelie bin in Rose.” He has a definite point. There are moments where the interaction between CGI and live action just doesn’t convince. Chief culprit, of course, is the Slitheen. Their CG running looks woeful, each Slitheen identical and moving far more smoothly than those cumbersome rubber costumes we have to endure the rest of the time. In fact, those chase sequences around Downing Street are so flatly directed it beggars belief. We never, never believe that the costumes match the CGI: they both look cheap and nasty. Elsewhere in the series, we’ve got the cartoony phial of anti-plastic (bad idea?) smashing as it hits the Nestene: it is as if suddenly, we’re in a Pixar movie. And then there’s that cork flying into plastic Mickey’s head…

The following year sees similar CG tragedies: David Tennant’s head is clumsily copied and pasted onto a man who can actually ride a horse through a mirror in The Girl in the Fireplace. But even this looks more convincing than the wig the same guy wears a few shots later. It has always irritated me how the spectacular sequence of the Cyber Controller climbing the zeppelin rope ends with him not being burnt up in the explosion below but vanishing with a little whooshy puff-of-smoke kind of noise. New Earth’s identical green pods for the walking dead look nothing like the respective location. And I wish that shot of the Daleks emerging at the end of Army of Ghosts looked at least a little bit genuine. 

CGI aside though, other embarrassments can be found in guest performers. Forget Cotton from The Mutants; I raise you the cast of Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. The brothers here are grim indeed. Mark Oliver as Bram Van Baalen is truly dreadful. He’s not even endearingly dreadful like Christian Cook as Ross in the already-mentioned Sontaran Stratagem. (How is this Sontaran caper so thoroughly enjoyable?) Cook’s delivery of the line “I timed that perfectly,” comes shortly after a joke he has completely failed to deliver at all. Even David Tennant – probably the nicest bloke in showbiz - looks like he’s acting with a mentally retarded fan who’s a bit too eager to please but they’re stuck in a car together and it’s all getting a bit awkward. Mark Oliver though… Jesus. His what-he-thinks-of-as Brando-style cool mumbling belies the fact that all the wrong words are stressed in every single line. He hasn’t a clue what he’s saying. When he dies early, it’s too soon. His brothers are almost as bad. I don’t understand how a story with only three people in its guest cast manages to employ such appallingly poor talent.

There are many examples of inexperienced actors on New Who: even Finlay Robertson as Larry in the otherwise brilliant Blink gives us his awfully staccato reading of “He tricked them. The Doctor tricked them. They’re never gonna move again.” He delivers it like a chid reading from a book for the first time. But then there’s the other fruitier problem: the very, very strong actor who has decided that today is a mess-about end-of-term going-over-the-top-for-the-lads sort of day. I’m looking at you Roger Lloyd Pack. He’s got three successive lines in that first manic scene of Rise of the Cybermen – all start with and. 

And they will refuse me?

And if I don’t?

And how will you do that from beyond the grave?

Lloyd Pack manages to make them sound even clunkier than they already are. He makes questions sound like statements. And gives every line equal weight with that insane vocal choice he’s adopted. Later he also gives us more terrific ands: Monitoring Jackie, he gifts us with, “And… restore!” That’s a personal favourite. Best perhaps is his cackling at the president after his “crashing the party” gag.

Elsewhere in New Who, we find Steven Berkoff, famously hard work on set, ruining the story’s ending for the greater good. We have a delightful scene of the clearly mental and alone Berkoff refusing to look at other actors, laughing under his breath and making no sense of his lines: “The TALLY must be met,” he intones, like a priest who’s forgotten what the words are about. Then there are those Dance BTech hand movements: he is rocking those fingernails, sister.

Mark Costigan as Max Capricorn is an equally treasurable scream. Thrill as he dicks about behind every other actor’s back. Tennant is figuring out the plot whilst Costigan shakes his head, bottom lip quivering. He’s a major gurn. He even manages to detract from The Death of Kylie with his big, open mouth. For those who abhor Voyage of the Damned (nutcases all) tune in for Prime Costigan at the end.

Frankly though, although there is much fun to be had with New-Who, the advancements in technology since the 60s, 70s and 80s mean that fluffs, errors and gaffs are not nearly as pronounced. Just as the 80s show really is incomparable to the as-live 60s episodes. The quality of the series is demonstrably better today. I sometimes ache for the times when a Roger Lloyd Pack barnstormer of a performance could sneak in under the radar. Michelle Gomez is the nearest the Capaldi era has come to the more free-wheeling performance. I wish he’d had a few more big bad villains to face off against.  As we move on into the Chibnall and Whittaker era, I hope that whilst visually what we get is going to be stunning, we can also enjoy one or two mental choices from the guest cast to help the stars align. Doctor Who comes complete with its embarrassments and I’d like a few more to balk at.

JH