Tuesday, 13 February 2018

Big Finish Reviews+ The First Doctor Adventures, Volume 1 by Tony J Fyler



Tony’s in an Unbound Dimension.

Here’s the thing.

People die.

Every day, they just keel over and stop being. As the Doctor would say, that’s fine – everything has its time, and everything dies. Even the people who, because they played a certain role, have become immortal in our imaginations. We’ll die too, one day, and they will go on being immortal in someone else’s imaginations, because – well, because that’s what immortality means.

In the world of audio drama though, you can be reborn as somebody else, and then, to some extent they’ll be immortal too, for playing you, playing someone that people have taken to their hearts. If you want to keep up your immortality, sooner or later that has to be true, and that has to be OK.

Big Finish has, for instance, recast Jon Pertwee as Tim Treloar, and now the Third Doctor, immortal as he is because of Pertwee, is having new ideas through the body and the voice of Treloar. And that’s fine. The company also frequently uses Frazer ‘Holy gods, that’s uncanny’ Hines to play the Second Doctor, rather than the annoyingly extinct Patrick Troughton, who made him famous. Elliot Chapman now plays Michael Craze playing Ben Jackson, and both William Russell and Peter Purves have got their different versions of William Hartnell’s First Doctor down beautifully.

And that’s fine too.

I mention all this by way of prelude to telling you I had no enthusiasm for this box set. None at all.

David Bradley’s a fantastic actor, and playing William Hartnell in An Adventure In Time And Space, I thought he was entirely peerless. I wasn’t, however, in favour of his being written into the actual TV Doctor Who as the First Doctor, because, to my mind he neither looked nor sounded like the character when dressed in the get-up. Time however had passed between An Adventure and Twice Upon A Time, and Bradley did enormously good work on screen, winning me over to his interpretation of the First Doctor (despite the occasionally heavy-handed writing which made the First Doctor out to be more blatantly sexist than he ever was on screen).

And I still had absolutely no enthusiasm for this box set, because while the other members of this Tardis crew (Jamie Glover as Ian, Jemma Powell as Barbara, and Claudia Grant as Susan) are all fine actors in their own right, their roles in An Adventure had been minimal, and they felt cast more as lookalikes than especially as sound-alikes. So bringing them across to audio felt like a visual cash-in without, necessarily, the vocal skills to support it.
So – does it work? Could a box set like this convert me?

Well, mostly yes…and a little no.

There are two four-part adventures in the first volume of The First Doctor Adventures – The Destination Wars, which takes the crew to an alien world, and The Great White Hurricane, which is a pure historical that drops our heroes into 19th century New York and entangles them in the lives of the local gangs in the shadow of a great big meteorological time bomb – a superstorm blizzard that is due to hit the whole east coast.

The first thing to say is that the writing is superb in both stories – Matt Fitton poses a great philosophical question about whether the ends justify the means in The Destination Wars, and Guy Adams gives us a pulse-pounder that works like a much better version of The Day After Tomorrow in The Great White Hurricane. As might be expected of these experienced hands, there’s barely a note wrong in either of the stories, either in terms of delivering adventures with solid hooks, engaging characters and proper dilemmas, or of evoking the period of the first two years of Doctor Who on screen.

In Fitton’s story particularly, the excitement is especially pulled along by the inclusion of what is now the earliest audio version of the Master, played by James Dreyfus. Yes, really, James Dreyfus, known to generations of Britcom-watchers as Constable Goody in The Thin Blue Line, or as Tom Farrell in Gimme Gimme Gimme. Known, possibly, to most Americans as the camp workmate of Hugh Grant in Notting Hill. That James Dreyfus…is the Master.
Nails it.

Totally, utterly, without a moment’s hesitation, nails it. Sounds like nothing for which he’s best known, but channels the darkness efficiently into a slightly pre-Delgado version still very much on the side of dark sanity, rather than the increasingly demented versions of Alex Macqueen or Michelle Gomez. James Dreyfus: you’ll believe a voice can sound elegantly malignant.

The dilemma of The Destination Wars taps into the sad historical reality that war is an accelerator pedal for technological advancement, and brings the Tardis crew into the lives of a family on a far-distant planet, as time passes and war is brought, intentionally, to them. There’s a neat touch of proto-Salamander underpinning the story, the Master as Enemy of An Entirely Different World, playing both sides against the middle to boost their advancement for his own unspeakable ends. Bradley and Dreyfus become a solidly antagonistic pair, more bluntly adversarial than Pertwee and Delgado, Davison and Ainley, Tennant and Simm or Capaldi and Gomez, and the dynamic of soured, embittered friendship helps power the drama along.

The Great White Hurricane fulfils its destiny as a pure historical by making the weather the big bad, and separating our heroes early. Much of the story is a quest by each of them to find the others and get back to the Tardis, which rings true to the period. The adventures they have along the way, including internecine teen gang wars, a mother in search of her stolen child, a frozen train full of stranded passengers and a frozen river leading to some Titanic action and an all-hands-on-deck effort to save lives are rich in characterization, meaning we enjoy the time we spend in New York, while still feeling the imperative pull of the weather that’s about to hit.

So – all good then?

Almost.

Bradley gets quite quickly into the swing of the audio adventures, and you begin believing that he’s just giving ‘another interpretation’ of the First Doctor you know and love. The rest of the Tardis crew though deliver their characters with varying degrees of success. Suffice it to say that in one case, the disparity between the performance of the original on screen and the performance here in audio goes beyond distracting and hits levels that disconnect the listener entirely from the character being played. It rather detracts from the drama when characters are put in peril if, whenever you hear them, you’re made to think ‘Who’s that again? No, really?’, and that’s what happens on this box set, though it’s more noticeable in The Great White Hurricane because in The Destination Wars, the Bradley-Dreyfus double act and the philosophical meat of the story does much to distract from that feeling of disconnection.

The stories are still compelling, and Bradley leads a bold effort to reimagine the First Doctor and his friends for the 21st century, allowing them to have new adventures. I would like to have been entirely wrong about the ‘lookalike, not sound-alike’ thing, and in forthcoming volumes, they may well square the circle and bring the one particularly distracting performance at least within a distance where with a hearty jump, the imagination of the listener can convince itself the character at least is the same, even if the person playing them is entirely different. In Volume 1, though, I’m only mostly wrong.

Mostly wrong is absolutely good enough to give this box set a whirl, incidentally. You can safely spend your money on the basis of my being mostly wrong.

But here’s to a future in which I’m increasingly, decidedly and thoroughly wrong.

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