Tony flies with the
Witches.
The Early Adventures range
of Doctor Who stories reaches right back to the show’s earliest years to create
some stories in ways that perhaps have fallen out of favour in subsequent
decades, but give them enough of a modern spin to let them intrigue 21st
century listeners.
The fourth series of these
Early Adventures kicks off with a new story for Patrick Troughton’s Second
Doctor and his earliest Tardis crew, Polly, Ben and Jamie.
We’re not in supernatural
territory here though – this is not Who Does Harry Potter or Rivers of London. The
Night Witches, written by Roland Moore, is a pure historical story, with no
aliens, no plots to take over the world – at least none from green, tentacled
monsters from the planet Zog – just the genuine push and pull of human history,
and the realisation that that’s plenty complicated enough, plenty dangerous
enough, and very often plenty fatal enough a thing to go messing about with.
The pure historical was baked into the DNA of Doctor Who right from the very
beginning, as part of the show’s mission to educate its mainly young audience
about historical subjects in an involving way. But kids are kids, and the pure
historicals were less popular than the ‘Pow!-zap!-Exterminate!’ playground
potential of the science fiction storylines, so they died out after Troughton’s
first season in the Tardis.
Big Finish has revived
them, and let the later Doctors get in on the purely historical action, but
there’s something about the ‘black and white’ Doctors of the Early Adventures
range that instinctively fits more with this kind of storytelling – not least because they’d died out before those
later Doctors got their Tardis keys, so we’re not pre-trained to hear later
Doctors in those stories.
The Night Witches lands
the Tardis crew in wartime Russia, with Nazi tanks on the advance, and introduces
us to the all-female bomber crew that earned themselves the Night Witch title
for their slow, relatively silent bombing raids. To make up for its lack of
alien threat, it does pull a sci-fi trope out of its bag though – Polly has an
exact doppelganger in the poster-girl for the Witches, adding agreeably to the
complications that abound and the potential plot-threads that are spun.
It’s fair to say that
angle of the ‘two Pollys’ is needed in this story, which suffers from the
precision with which it recreates some of the pure historical stories – by
which we mean it spends a lot of time moving people from A-B and then a lot of
time trying to move them back from B-A, only to run into complications. What
this does is minimise the action elements in favour of allowing us to get to
know and care about the period and its people – and in particular in this case,
the group of exhausted, starving, intensely brave women who did what they could
do to fight the threat of the Nazi war machine. But still, in The Night
Witches, there are moments when perhaps a touch
more plot wouldn’t go amiss. Moore’s script discovers the plotting button more
distinctly towards the end, but even then – and rightly so – the plots that are
hatched feel like desperation measures, of the kind you’d expect from a group of young, starving, exhausted, frayed-nerved
people increasingly likely to never see another dawn. There’s that feeling of
World War I, Somme-like desperation to do anything to avoid going over the top
in some strands, and the blank-eyed slablike desperation to do anything that
can help them win in some others.
It’s all very evocative, and certainly it does the job of putting us in the
mindset of the time and place and people we get to drop in on through the magic
of the Tardis, but the lack of a particular in-story Big Bad means it can
sometimes feel unfocused and scrappy and, to coin a phrase, ‘just one damned
thing after another.’
That said, the
performances throughout are very good. In particular, the Tardis team are on
spectacular form, Anneke Wills rising to the occasion of having a distinctly
Polly-centred story with a performance that prints the heart of her companion
right on the memory of the listener. Elliot Chapman gets better every time he
plays Ben, and here he’s more or less indistinguishable from the original
article. And Frazer Hines…there are really too few words for the wonder of
Frazer Hines, who not only continues to give us a Jamie as bright and bold and
resourceful as ever he was, but also continues to send shivers down listeners’
spines with his intensely evocative take on the Patrick Troughton Doctor. It’s
genuinely uncanny, and Moore in this story gives Hines a demented amount to do,
not least having heated arguments with himself as the two characters he plays.
The three main Night Witches we meet are agreeably distinct - Anjella
Mackintosh gives Polly-double Tatiana Kregki a pragmatism that feels real,
Wanda Opalinska makes commander Nadia Vasney a classic case of someone who’s
been at war too long on too few rations and too little sleep, and Kristina
Buikaite gives
Lilya Grankin a sweet gaucheness that makes her the most appealing of the three.
The Night Witches is worth
checking out, both as a tribute to the real women on whom the story is loosely based,
and as a more interesting, richly characterised and female-driven story than
many in the history of Doctor Who. If it doesn’t blast the fourth series of
Early Adventures off into the stratosphere with a story that demands immediate
and repeat re-listening, it does bring it down to Earth and give us an
unblinking look at female bravery under extreme duress against the forces of
Nazism. Given the world in which we find ourselves, that means The Night
Witches is a story that feels unexpectedly appropriate in 2017.
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