Tony’s chilling beachside.
If you’re
looking for soothing British voices, you can’t go far wrong with Michael Palin.
Python, world traveller and interpreter of the world’s many wonderful madnesses
for the viewer at home, Michael Palin, when he wants to use it, has one of
those voices that can make you believe things are all about to work out just
fine.
Jussssst
fine…
While
presumably the Tim Foley’s script came first, it’s a joy that Tropical Beach
Sounds and Other Relaxing Seascapes #4 seems to absolutely need a voice
like Palin’s.
It starts
off like a relaxation or meditation tape, all inner light and breathing in, but
evolves into something more akin to a walk-through Choose Your Own Adventure
book, as the voice of Palin – and make no mistake, it’s identified as the
voice of Palin within the piece - takes ‘you’ on a journey through the inner
mindscapes that make up your psychology. Joyfully ripping the piss out of the
ever over-convenient translation of things and people into archetypes and
psychobabble, it takes you on a journey into something called…The Hub. The Hub
is a closed mind, it tells you, that needs to be opened to let the light in.
Captain Jack is the Captain of your Destiny, the version of You that you were
meant to be. Ianto Jones is the spirit of positivity. Toshiko Sato is all
things intellectual and inquisitive, Owen Harper all things dark and
negative…and so on.
It’s an
invasion story, absolutely, but it’s delivered in the tones of Palin as a
psychic and psychological battle between good and evil, yin and yang, the force
of authority and the force of…of…of something or someone who keeps trying to
turn the tour back into a simple seaside meandering.
Palin
is of course well experienced with vast swathes of text, but he’s actually the
only voice you hear throughout this story, which makes it a remarkable
achievement. The storyline itself – invasion via meditation and psychobabble
balderdash – is very cheeky, very Torchwood and inordinately good fun. Plus you
get to hear Michael Palin turn on the dime of a moment, from calming presence
in your head to vicious, swearing, power-addicted monster, quite prepared to
prey not only on your deeper psychological fears, but to threaten pain,
humiliation, you name it, when ‘you’ don’t do as he wants. It’s a rewarding
listen, this story, but for something with perhaps the oddest title in at least
recent Big Finish history, it has moments that are swift as a dagger and dark
as motive. Be warned – you probably need to be having an ‘up’ day to get
through this one unaffected by the manipulations of its villain, because there
are times when that villain echoes all the darkest thoughts you’ll have had
about yourself, and the ending, while it’s ultimately positive, isn’t fought on
the same battleground, so it might not give you the psychological rebalancing
you need.
Normally
of course there’d be performances to extol, but as a single-voice audio, it’s
all Palin, all the time, and as such, it’s all pure joy. In fact, there are
moments when the power that is Palin helps sell some of the script’s balder
patches. Certainly, those patches are necessary to get you from the A-B of the
story, but in lesser hands, they might well have fallen flat – moments for
instance where the villainous voice in your head is clearly scrabbling for
inventions to fit in with the psychobabble of the meditation tape ethos by
which it lures its victims in, seeming to riff freely in the moment. That’s dangerous
writing because it flirts along the borderline of intended floundering
(in the writing) and unintended floundering, in the seeming moment of
the invention by the villainous character, and you need someone with a
particular gift for insouciance to sell the idea. Michael Palin, fortunately,
brings exactly what you need to the recording.
There’s
a very Invisible Enemy vibe to this story, but with twinkly
achievement-noises every time ‘you’ have a human interaction with one of the
Torchwood team – it’s not exactly a ‘Contact has been made’ moment, but it’s
close – and what is actually happening, who and what the villain actually
is remains a little unclear, but as the battle rages on for control of
‘you,’ Palin is able to imbue his own voice with the personalities of two
separate characters at war, and while he rages and threatens the psychological
violence of all your bad memories set free to flood through your mind, it’s
actually just as often the physical threat inherent in the loss of control of
your body that will make you go cold in this story – the Palin-voiced villain
tells you they can make you do anything, and there are several examples of
self-harm here, from the holding of a breath to the point of passing out to
hitting a door over and over again, for no other reason that it hurts and
damages the host, the ‘you’ that is increasingly controlled by the voice in
your head.
The resolution to the
story seems to suffer slightly from the single voice format – it feels like
when the power of goodness is victorious, it could actually do with separation
into the second voice, the voice of the force that’s been trying to frustrate
the Palin-villain all the way through the story, but that would probably lessen
the sense of awe that this story carries by being single-voice from start to
finish.
All in all, Tropical Beach Sounds and Other Relaxing Seascapes
#4 is absolutely worth a listen, not
least because it’s an hour of Michael Palin speaking into your ear, but also
because it acts as a kind of metaphor for the battle between positive and
negative impulses, positive and negative views of yourself that will resonate
with many listeners and fascinate even more. As a Torchwood story, it’s a neat
inversion of the normal, with the story more or less told from the point of
view of the villain, and oh yeah, did we mention it’s Michael Freakin’ Palin
as a devious voice-villain from the depths of Who-Knows-Where trying to take
over the hub through a meditation tape!
Don’t hesitate – it’s not like
you can experience actual beach sounds right now. Experience the next
best thing with audio Torchwood and Tropical Beach Sounds and Other Relaxing
Seascapes #4.
No comments:
Post a Comment