‘Who turned out the
lights?’ asks Tony.
One of the Sixth Doctor’s
most recent audio companions, Leading WREN Constance Clarke, was plucked out of
Bletchley Park during World War II. As such, writers of stories for her, and
Miranda Raison who plays her, have been keen to balance all the characteristics
that go into making a good companion – curiosity, compassion, feistiness and
fun – with something of the stainless steel backbone of the time and place from
which she comes.
It’s too easy these days
to look back on that ‘Blitz spirit’ as a kind of hopeless naivety, a country placing
its faith in its leaders and believing in an absolute right and an absolute
wrong. In our world, moral relativism would cut in and short circuit any such
certainty. But back then, they needed that sense of self-belief to get
extraordinary things done – things which, for instance, required civilian
conscription and food rationing.
Constance is a model of
that spirit, a believer in goodness and evil, and of working to make the former
victorious over the latter as a kind of moral duty. In The Darkened Earth, though,
without especially challenging the concepts
of good and evil, she certainly gets a new perspective on the wartime
propaganda image of ‘our brave boys, flying off to beat the Nazis.’ It stops
short of moral relativism, but it’s a broadening of natural compassion out to
include ‘the enemy.’ Because John Pritchard’s script takes us to Germany during
the war, to a night time full of blackouts and fear and huddling together
against a threat from the skies, as British planes circle, ready to drop death
on people who are, to all intents and purposes, innocent victims of the
politics of their national leaders. It’s a historical reality that the air war
was fought in both directions, and families in Germany took the same
precautions as those in Britain, denying the enemy the chance of a target in
the night. Constance has a moment of world-flipping realisation in this story,
as she comes to care for a family with whom she and the Doctor join forces against
an altogether more dangerous enemy.
There are some good
quality scares in Pritchard’s script, and Lisa Bowerman can always be relied
upon to pull them off the page. Without giving too much away, there’s a
bogeyman stalking the town in the hours of darkness, who leaves people dead,
and with shrivelled, useless eyes. Finding it, finding ways to communicate with
it and hopefully stop it from feasting on the town, the country, and possibly
the world, Constance and the Doctor have a series of logical problems to deal
with, all while safeguarding a family understandably disposed to fear rather
than common sense. It’s a game of blind man’s buff with a killer in the dark,
and as such, there are sweaty, heart-thumping moments throughout, and Constance
gets to show the goodness of her heart and the bravery that’s inherent in her
by putting herself in the way of the danger to protect a family she doesn’t
know, and particularly some children she comes to like, and see not as the
enemy but as a hope for the future.
Is The Darkened Earth
especially memorable then?
Actually yes, for a few
reasons. Firstly, there’s some solid structural underpinning in Pritchard’s
story, so it develops as it rolls on. Secondly, Bowerman’s direction is crisp,
taking the material and pulling the maximum emotional investment out of it.
There’s enough for the Doctor to do to prove himself – and the very particular
Sixth Doctor quality of a fierce burning need
to communicate with aggressors, to try and talk a way through to solutions,
comes through strongly. But mostly, there’s Miranda Raison as Constance, giving
one of the most crisp and distinctly ‘wartime English’ performances so far in
her tenure as a companion, while showing her very human compassion, her
empathy, her bravery and what, back in the day, she might have called her
pluck. You come out of the other side of this story with either a newfound or
an intensified respect for Constance Clarke, who keeps her head while letting
her heart beat for the lives of others and opening her mind to a broader way of
seeing the conflict with which she’s so intimately involved.
All for under £3! The
Short Trips range frequently punches way above its price point, and in The
Darkened Earth, John Pritchard, Lisa Bowerman and especially Miranda Raison
deliver another cut-price cracker.
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