Big Finish Reviews+ Static by Tony J Fyler

We all love a good scary story – the notion of being scared just enough, and then having the scary-thing defeated or explained away is fundamental to childhood, and fundamental to Doctor Who. Without it, there’d be no Daleks, no Cybermen, no Weeping Angels, and no need for a Doctor to make it all alright again.

Static, the new Sixth Doctor audio adventure from Big Finish, is properly creepy, scary stuff, using plenty of horror movie tropes, and giving them a British twist of dripping, chilly dismalness.

Writer Jonathan Morris creates the caravan park of the damned, with a creepy caretaker, a seemingly programmable mist that stops people leaving the park, and a couple whose relationship has never recovered from a death in their past.

But at this particular caravan park, when the mist comes down, the dead come back to life.

See? Properly creepy.

Of course, it’s difficult to sustain that intense creepiness over two hours, and Static is a story of two halves, with the first two episodes intensifying the shivers – dead relatives, skeletons found in trees, mystical stone circles, phones that ring when they’re disconnected, the voices of the dead coming through the static on a portable TV and so on. The second half does the classic Doctor Who thing – adding facts, science and alien technology to explain the mysteries of the set-up, and letting the Doctor save us all from a fate worse – or at least more certain – than death.

On the way to a conclusion that has its fair share of punch, the story brings in a secret RAF project from World War II, a body-farming project, and an alien species with a particular methodology that makes sense of all the creepy-seeming elements. There’s a degree of timey-wiminess to the plot, as the Doctor and his wartime companion, Leading WREN Constance Clarke, flit from the present day back to the war to uncover what’s really going on, leaving modern teen Flip in the caravan park of unparalleled creepiness with the troubled couple, the axe-wielding caretaker and the waves of dead people walking out of the mist.

In terms of the punch, one of the companions faces the reality of her death in this story, and we’re not about to tell you if death is a permanent condition for the Sixth Doctor’s crew. Certainly, the reactions of her fellow time travellers are played real and raw, meaning there are emotionally harrowing moments in Static, as well as creepy horror and body horror threads.

If there’s a stand-out performance in this story, it undoubtedly comes from David Graham as Percy Till, the caravan caretaker. Graham’s in his nineties now, and has a strong geeky pedigree, having worked as a Dalek voice on the very first story in which they appeared, and also being the voice behind both Brains and Parker in the classic Thunderbirds. Here, he adds a kind of weary certainty to his performance as Till, which gives the caravan park a sense of ancient, bristling threat that carries the creep-factor for at least the first two episodes.

Underneath it all, Static is a workaday alien invasion story, and all the things you’d expect of such a Doctor Who story are here – alien tech disguised as something else, the Doctor being noble, twists, turns, possession, time travel, you name it, it’s here. But it’s in the initial set-up of its atmosphere that Static stands out from the crowd of similar invasion stories. Let yourself sink into the chilly mist of Static’s premise and it’ll give you more than a few shudders en route to the logical conclusion.