Thursday, 4 October 2018

Big Finish Reviews+ A Small Semblance of Home by Tony J Fyler



Tony finds home in all the oddest places.

Though it began as a way of getting new voices into the writing pool at Big Finish, and a way of taking brave new angles on the Tardis teams we know and love, the Short Trips range has become a quirky stalwart of the company’s output, adding massively to our understanding and appreciation of the lives and personalities of our various Doctors and companions.

A Small Semblance Of Home, by Paul Phipps, takes us back to what feels like the earliest of early days, with the original Tardis team – the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara. More than that though, it takes us back to days when there was still a sense of absolute division in the Tardis, an ‘Us and Them’ dynamic, with the spiky, cantankerous Doctor not having yet softened towards his captive Earthlings, and they not having entirely committed to the life of time travel but chafing against what was essentially a kidnapping. Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford, was the uneasy bridge between the two groups, while having plenty of issues of her own that neither the Doctor nor the Earthlings could entirely understand.

It’s this black and white early tension that Phipps and producer Lisa Bowerman conjure in this story. The Doctor has been on an obsessive scientific treasure hunt for weeks now, demanding regular help from the Earthlings but never deigning to let them in on his plans. They just have to do as he says, because it’s his ship, and therefore his rules, unless they want to find themselves marooned on the next planet they come to.

Barbara is getting increasingly fractious as she tries to keep hold of the Earthbound concept of days to regulate her actions – when to eat, when to sleep and so on – refusing to give in to the more temporally relative rhythms of life on board a time machine. And Ian, always ready in the early days to challenge their cantankerous old pilot, is being rubbed more and more raw by the Doctor’s high-handed quest for a very particular plant.

Phipps captures that very early sense of the teachers’ reluctance to be shipmates, of trying to impose a Sixties British ‘normality’ on the vastness of time and space, and the initial aloofness of the Doctor, feeling no compunction to have to explain himself to the interlopers who forced their way on board his ship.

The thing about the Hartnell incarnation of course was that he started out gruff, suspicious and high-handed with the humans on his ship, and eventually grew more avuncular, more fun and friendly, as he learned how to still live his life on his own terms, but to include them as members of his surrogate family. A Small Semblance Of Home is that story, condensed into a single incident. It’s the Doctor, while still not noticing his own obsessive drives and mostly ignoring the Earthlings and their seeming crankiness, working towards a thing he’s sure will ultimately improve their lives and the atmosphere on board the Tardis. While he finds it entirely superfluous to explain the reasons for his quest, there’s something of the surprise birthday party planner about his actions, and you make the journey of the story with the teachers – from affront and irritation, through worry and weariness, to almost-despair at the difference between themselves and their pilot…to an eventual reveal that makes you smile, that could almost, were you in an especially soppy mood, convince you you have something in your eye. Phipps, Bowerman and Ford take us on a rattling ride of increasingly stretched nerves, only to end up serving us a treat, a resolution that makes us smile, and makes us see the First Doctor in a new and warmer light – the light with which, given so much hindsight, we’re familiar, but which is efficiently driven from our mind throughout the story by its effective drawing of the earlier, spikier Doctor.

A Small Semblance Of Home is ultimately a thing of black and white First Doctor loveliness, though to deliver its ending, it will drive you right back to the unpredictable early days. Both of these are things that recommend it to the listener – go on, forgo the cost of one Chai Latte, and have yourself A Small Semblance Of Home today.

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