Who Reviews The Ark by Tony J Fyler

Tony mucks out the Monoids.

Doctor Who has always been a show driven by imagination and stories, rather than practical deliverables and budgets. That means there have always been stories that, while working brilliantly as stories, have been let down by wobbly sets and naff monsters.

The Ark, from First Doctor William Hartnell’s third season, is one of those stories. At its core, The Ark is a brilliant tale - humans fleeing the destruction of the Earth by the Sun, taking all the animals with them, along with micro-dotted human beings and a friendly bunch of mute creatures called the Monoids. It takes in themes of privilege and revolution and also, deals with the consequences of the Doctor’s interference in time and space as the Doctor’s companion Dodo bring a cold on board the spaceship. Having no resistance, the super-evolved crew start dropping like flies. There’s a trial, there’s the Doctor in scientific mode trying to find an antidote, and then, job done, the Tardis crew bog off into time and space – only to return immediately to the Ark 700 years later, to find the Monoids no longer mute, no longer docile and frankly ruling the roost. It’s not quite Planet of the Apes, but it is rather Spaceship of the Monoids.

Sadly, the Monoids on-screen reduced The Ark to ‘that one with the stupid one-eyed Beatle-haired things.’ They were badly realised on what felt like an aggressive level, and they robbed the story of any real ability to shock or provoke.

Good news! The audiobook version means you can invent your own Monoids, albeit they’re described in the text. Your mind has a bigger budget than the BBC in the Sixties, and so the Monoids, while still being front and centre of the action here, stop being so much of a focus-drag.

The audiobook by Paul Erickson manages to take a four-part story that always on screen felt like two two-parters knitted together (two episodes with the humans in charge, followed by two on a Monoid-run Ark), and expand it to feel like a valuable six-parter, with a long trial as the Doctor and Co are sentenced to death for bringing a fatal disease on board the Ark, and some exploring in different environments and biospheres to find vaccine ingredients. There’s more texture to the novelization than ever made it on screen too – we learn how Monoid One came to power, which gives a rewarding reality to the revolution of the Monoids, and we also get a bit of backstory for Jackie Lane’s Dodo.

The Ark then feels like a more substantial story in the novelization than it did on screen, and its themes are given more time to expand and bed in.

Peter Purves, on reading duties, is perfect here. His Steven, the companion he played in the story, is of course perfect, but he also delivers a Dodo that makes you want to dig out more Dodo stories and watch them, and over the last decade, at Big Finish and BBC Audio, he’s been honing his version of the First Doctor to the point where it’s utterly believable and consistent, meaning he strongly anchors Doctor Who stories that need a nuanced characterisation of the First Doctor to hold them together. Even his Monoids sounds less distracting than the on-screen versions, helping you to get away from the visual of them, and making the run-time of this audio novelization fly by.

Pick up The Ark on audiobook today – it’s probably the best version of this story you’ll ever own.  

Big Finish Reviews+ The Churchill Years, Volume Two by Tony J Fyler

  

Tony gives Churchill a V-sign.

Full disclosure time. Before Volume 1 of The Churchill Years was released, I was not a fan of the idea of using him as an anchor for a whole spin-off series. Ian McNeice’s Churchill on screen had been one of only a few highlights of Victory of the Daleks but turning him into the anchor for a series of Doctor-adjacent stories felt like stretching his capabilities as a character within the world of Doctor Who beyond the point of diminishing returns.

Then the first volume came out, and I was utterly, utterly wrong. Doesn’t happen often, but there you go, let’s never speak of it again.

So with Volume 2, what we have is a much stronger sense of instinctive reliability on approach to the box set – but does it deliver?

Yes it does, but just slightly less than the first set.

This collection of tales focuses for three of its four stories on Churchill’s war years, and brings two Ninth Doctor stories, one Tenth and one Eleventh to the party. Oh and Madam Vastra. Churchill and Vastra, side by side – that’s got to be worth the price of admission, no?

Paul Morris kicks us off with Young Winston, a tale of magic jewels, historical legends, and the volatile background of Cuba. Set in 1985 and 1899, it follows Churchill on a trip to Cuba to get a taste of war, and then, as he begins to make his parliamentary way in the world, the ghosts of hot-blooded nations and people surface in his life.

It’s a story that bristles with star power and crossover potential, with Churchill and Vastra swapping narration duties in the different tones of the Churchill Diaries and the Chronicles of the Great Detective (Now that’s an audio spin-off we’d pay good money for), but it delivers far more than a star pairing and a jewelled MacGuffin – there’s an enormous well of tenderness in the story of the young Winston (Iain Batchelor) and his mysterious Cuban friend Carmen, played with sensitivity by the gloriously-named Melody Grove, and it leaves you wanting more crossover stories between the Paternoster Gang and the future Prime Minister. Churchill and Strax for box set 3, anyone?

Human Conflict by Iain McLaughlin is a story that highlights, in a way similar to but harsher than Victory of the Daleks, the dichotomy between Churchill’s drive to win total war at any cost and his friendship with the Doctor. It’s harsher because this is a story in which the Doctor with the big ears and the leather jacket is advisor, judge, jury and rescuer as Churchill explores the potential of alien weaponry in the early years of the war.

Advised not to get involved in an arms deal that could potentially win the Allies the war, Churchill, like Harriet Jones in later years, goes against the wishes of his taciturn Time Lord friend, leading to a solid story of derring-do, stand-offs, a terrible price, and perhaps most remarkably of all, a portrayal of Churchill from McNeice that shows why, even with his war-hawk intuitions, Churchill was a man inherently good enough to earn the Doctor’s friendship. It’s moderately romanticised stuff of course, but the Churchill of Doctor Who has never been the Churchill of real life. Nevertheless, Human Conflict brings good performances to the fore, especially from Bethan Walker as Bragnar, and feels like a Sunday afternoon black and white war movie, only Doctor Whoed up.

I Was Churchill’s Double, by Alan Barnes, romps home with this box set’s ‘complicate the living bejesus out of a plotline’ prize. Into what sounds like it should be a straightforward tale of deception, doubles and associated tomfoolery, Barnes brings fairy tales, parallel dimensions, self-hypnosis through a howlaround TV interference pattern (a lovely touch, that), secret plans, two Churchills, John Logie Baird, undercover Nazis and a whole lot more. Oh, and the Ninth Doctor again, popping up having lost his Tardis somewhere. It’s a storyline you don’t want to try and follow while, for instance, operating heavy machinery, because you won’t stand a chance of working out what’s going on. You won’t if you give it your full attention either, but it will unfold for you better if you dedicate your lugholes to it for the space of an hour. McNeice is on top form in this story – which is just as well, given its double dose of Churchill – and he gets to slightly vary his performance to differentiate between the two. Compelling stuff, but you might like to have a cup of tea and a biscuit ready at the end, so as to untwist your brain.

Churchill Victorious shows us the man who led the British war on the day of its effective completion – with London, with the whole country celebrating on what rations it can scrape together, Churchill feels himself alone, and under faintly ridiculous Dad’s Army cover, he goes out looking for, if not trouble, then at least an honest communion with his people. Naturally of course, he runs into power cuts, a populace less grateful than he might have expected, an alien aggressor and a prisoner with familiar puppydog enthusiasm and demented hair. Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky are rarely writers to rush to their point, but here they give us a story that’s seemingly innocuous but eventually builds to a test of Churchill’s soul – how far will he go to ensure his personal victory, his legacy, his immortality among the British people?

There’s a line of balance to be drawn with Churchill – on the one hand you don’t want to overstud his life and career with incidents with the Doctor. For those who like him in the real world, it could potentially take away from the man’s own greatness. For those who don’t, it could feel like the Doctor’s trust was misplaced. And the ending of the second box set, coinciding with the end of the war, could work as the moment to fade out on Churchill. But there’s no real reason why it has to – McNeice is clearly in great form, and Churchill’s life was long and studded with real incidents which lend themselves to a Doctor Who treatment. On the strength of this box set and its predecessor, a third set would be no hardship at all, and with the dramatic returns showing only faint signs of diminishing so far, there’s no reason why Churchill himself shouldn’t KBO for a while yet at Big Finish.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips: Mel-Evolent by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s away with the fairies.

Written by Simon A Forward.

Read by Bonnie Langford.

Doctor Who and fairy tales. What could possibly go wrong?

Not, as it turns out, an awful lot if you trust your Time Lord fairy tale to Simon A Forward.

The Short Trips are a playground, where writers can do almost anything, so long as they can craft their anything into the time run-time of a short story. They’ve been used to add depth and weight to companion characterisation, to show vital moments in the Doctor’s life that have never been seen on screen, to add texture to the Doctor Who universe, and to even show the kind of adventure that is commonplace on the Tardis, but still has a threat level that gets the pulse racing.

Forward does all that and more besides in his tale of Mel and the fairy queen of darkness, the with-queen from the other side of the mirror.

Mel-Evolent starts with scenes that both perfectly encapsulate the 80s, technicolour vibe of Bonnie Langford’s time with the Sixth Doctor, and gently satirizes the keenness with which both Colin Baker and Langford used to take to the pantomime stage. ‘Once upon a space and time…’ it begins – you’re almost hoping for an ‘Oh no it isn’t!’ thrown in, but Forward moves things along quickly – a trip to the Tardis theatre (oh yes, it has a theatre now), gives us a declaiming Doctor, a costume bundle, a stab of nostalgia and then, rapidly, a shiver of danger as Evil-Mel looks back at them from a dark – not to say a black – mirror.

Forward’s pacing of the plot here is impressive, as the genuine danger to the here-and-now in which our heroes exist is quickly explained and escalated, and the Mel in the mirror, looking for all the world like a particular horn-headed Disney witch-queen, sends evil, misshapen dwarfish minions to devour the Tardis.

While the Doctor stays behind to Do Something Clever With That Pigging Exercise Bike, it’s up to Mel to dress up like her Inner Badass and go to do battle with her doppelganger to save the day.

The temptation, when writing a Doctor Who fairy tale, is to only go so far, to go along obvious lines, or to allow the Doctor to stay in fairy tale territory too long, to the point of believing the myth, rather than giving some kind of anchored science fantasy explanation (New Who, Series 5, we’re looking at you).

Mel-Evolent does none of those things, but fuses Doctor Who and fairy tale lore in a new, inventive way that pushes beyond the ordinary, and makes you realise the power of a really good writer, to deliver things you would never have thought of. The actual threat in this story, the what of it and why of it, is sublime, and you won’t see it coming till a heartbeat before it arrives – Forward gives you just that long to realise what it is, and just enough description to trigger your nostalgia, before moving…erm…forward in terms of plotting and emotional punch. Forward delivers a story that goes beyond traditional fairy tales, to really nail the Doctor Whoness of his story to your consciousness, leaving you well and truly satisfied at the end of it all. What’s more, there’s a quality to the actual descriptions of things like ‘liquid space’ that make you stop and clap the business of writing, the ability creative people have to go beyond the workaday and open your mind to things you never thought you’d see.

Bonnie Langford was one of the most poorly served companion-actresses in Classic Who, from her two-line character description, to her frequent reduction to boggling, screaming and asking ‘What’s that, Doctor?’ in scripts which left her little else to do.

Big Finish has worked for years to give her more to work with as an actress, and this Short Trip punches above its run-time as far as expansion of character is concerned. Langford for her part takes to this opportunity to go to the Dark Side, and especially when she comes face to face with her mirror-side doppelganger, there’s a sense of visual and vocal differentiation that’s very easy to imagine on screen. In fact, the combination of Forward’s descriptive prose for some areas of this trip into a weird realm, and Langford’s assured but Mel-breathy delivery, lets you lose yourself in the visuals of this audio short very easily, and rewards you for doing so with one of the more immersive Short Trips in recent times.

Overall, this is a barnstorming Doctor Who fairy tale, and among the best examples of its kind, because it goes that extra mile on every level – the story doesn’t rest on familiar fairy tale territory but pushes beyond to give you imaginative surprises that make you think about them even after the story’s over. It takes Mel to new places, where you wouldn’t ordinarily imagine her going, and so proves a constant but little-regarded element of her nature as a person – when faced with necessity, Mel pushes down her fears, rolls up her sleeves and gets on with the job at hand to the best of her ability.

So – a magical mystery tour to the land beyond the mirror, a strengthening of the character of one of Doctor Who’s most poorly-served companions, a Doctor Who fairy tale that merges real-world threat with fantastical imagery, and all in the space, and for the price, of a Short Trip. It’s been a while since Forward wrote a Big Finish story. On the strength of this, it shouldn’t be so long till he writes his next.