Tony’s Fyler’s in
trouble.
‘Ah, a businessman! I should have
guessed from the spouting of the nonsensical drivel.’
John Dorney’s having a
good time with Big Finish right now. The man charged with uniting two of the
finest Masters in a single adventure also gets both the enormous privilege and,
from the sound of it, the enormous fun, of bringing back Drax for a
long-delayed second encounter with the Doctor.
The tone for this story is
‘caper,’ in the sense of the great sixties clever crime stories like Ocean’s
Eleven and Gambit, or the great ITC TV shows like Danger Man and Man In A
Suitcase – there’s a pace that suits the image of characters running while
backgrounds change around them, and there are distinct musical cues that evoke
the period throughout this story.
In terms of plotting, it
has very much that vibe of Ocean’s Eleven, Gambit or The Thomas Crown Affair:
trust nothing, trust no-one, there’s more going on than you can possibly
imagine. As a vehicle for the character of Drax, it’s utterly successful,
evolving the character somewhat from the slightly luckless loveable rogue
played by Barry Jackson in The Armageddon Factor.
What makes the story a
little bittersweet is that Jackson was enthusiastic to reprise his role as the
Time Lord con-man and genius engineer, but sadly died before recording could
begin.
If you were looking for a
perfect replacement for the cockney-accented Time Lord though, you couldn’t do
better than Ray Brooks, familiar to Brit-geeks of a certain age as the voice of
Mr Benn and King Rollo, and to Brit-geeks of the same age slightly later on as
poker-addict Robbie Box from Big Deal. Brooks has just the kind of cheeky
chappie twinkle in his voice you need to deliver Drax, and it could have worked
as a direct replacement for Barry Jackson’s original. But the joy of playing a
Time Lord of course is there’s no need to disrespect the original to any
degree, so Brooks plays the Third Drax in a way that’s similar to Jackson’s
original, but with enough of a twist to make the character his own.
The story is very much
rooted in those sixties clever crime movies – Drax is about to pull off a heist
of some specialised information from Altrazar, which Romana helpfully describes
as a ‘temporal Atlantis,’ a kind of mythical, and quite possibly non-existent
planet which has a Douglas Adams ring about it. It’s a place that ‘literally
doesn’t exist,’ which has become a dumping ground for all the secrets the
ultra-rich don’t want discovered.
Ultra-rich businessman
Charles Kirland, played with an upper-class heartlessness by Hugh Ross (Captain
Hastings in TV’s Poirot, and more recently President of the Terran Federation
in the Big Finish Blake’s 7 adventures), wants them discovered very badly, and
discovered by him as a way of safeguarding his own business interests and
ruining his arch-rival, Galdron Cabot (played by John ‘also the tin dog’
Leeson). Sadly, only time-sensitives can even tell that Altrazar is even there,
so he hires Drax to collect the secrets for him – and Drax in turn ropes in the
Doctor.
So far, so fun. But this
is Drax we’re talking about – and Dorney does solid service to the character by
giving the wily Time Lord a trick or two, or three, or even four up his
sleeves, meaning the heist quickly becomes something else entirely, and by the
end of the story has metamorphosed into something else again. It’s a clever
crime caper – as committed by Time Lords. If you loved Time Heist on TV, you’ll
love The Trouble With Drax. Perhaps perversely, if you hated Time Heist on TV,
you’ll probably love The Trouble With Drax even more, because not to put too
fine a point on it, Dorney brings more imagination to bear than Stephen
Thompson did, delivering a puzzle within a puzzle within a puzzle that, like
those classic crime capers, continues to deliver surprises right to the end.
Granted, after a while, you start to get into the groove of the storytelling,
so you start to think ‘What you need now is for This to happen,’ just before it
does, but in some ways, that’s part of the delight because the joy of those
crime capers is that the thieves are usually clever enough to get away with it,
and long before the end, we want them to, we side with them because
they’re clever enough to get away with it. You certainly want Drax to get away
with it by the end of this story. Whether he does or not…
Well, that would be
telling, now wouldn’t it?
In addition to Tom Baker
and Lalla Ward on good form, Ward’s Romana coming across early in the story as
almost exhausted with the Doctor’s irresponsibility, the technical baddies
include Brooks as Drax and Fraser as Kirkland, but like the sixties movies, there’s
quality all the way down the cast list here, showing the serious clout of the
Big Finish contact book, and the Big Finish reputation. John Challis, Scorby
from The Seeds of Doom and later Boycie in Only Fools And Horses, returns to
the world of Who as Rosser, Kirkland’s muscle, and Sixth Doctor
companion-actress Miranda Raison here swaps Bakers to take on the role of
Inspector Fleur McCormick, the force of law who’s hell bent on bringing Drax to
justice.
Quality, quality, quality.
Quality, quality, quality.
Dorney’s script gives them
all plenty to do, and gives each of them a twist which spins the drama,
escalating what starts out as a simple heist story into something far more Time
Lord and much more fun. From Dorney’s barking but glorious script to the
performances by all the named actors to the sound design that evokes the period
and the genre, the Trouble With Drax – like an impressive number of releases in
this season of Fourth Doctor stories – will be one you’ll happily listen to
time and time again, for its polished pleasures and its sheer knockabout fun.
Go get into trouble with Drax today.
No comments:
Post a Comment