Reviews Torchwood: Drive by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s lost in Cardiff. 

You can rely on writer David Llewellyn for a lot of things. Creating characters you want to spend time with? Check. Giving great story twists to ideas that would in other hands be fairly flat chunks of storytelling? Check. Delivering realistic, character-driven laughs? Double check and mate. 

One of his particular side niches in audio Torchwood though is drawing convincing Cardiff landscapes and characters, bringing the city into the drama in a way that on-screen Torchwood regularly tried to do. 

In Drive, he takes a badly injured Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori) on a tour of some of the less salubrious parts of Cardiff in a cab driven by a woman named Fawzia (Suzanne Packer), in search of a thief with an alien bit of gubbinry – a kind of teleporter which exacts a price every time you use it (not unlike a cab itself). 

There’s a level on which the plot becomes secondary to the chase in this story, but given that the chase foregrounds the talents of Naoko Mori and Suzanne Packer, you really don’t mind that at all. Because ultimately, that’s the heart and soul of the story – Tosh is very much an outsider in lots of areas of her life, not least in her work, but very much in Cardiff. She has, at this point in her life, yet to unbend to her environment. If she’s not overtly keeping Cardiff at bay, she certainly has yet to let it get under her skin, or to understand it.

That will have changed at least a little by the end of the very long night that makes up Drive, and mostly it will have changed by her being forced into communion and talk with Fawzia, a garrulous, pro-people cabbie who’s going gradually blind. 

There are plenty of movie precedents for the relationship they forge while Tosh hunts for the alien artefact and the thief who’s using it. But there’s something uniquely Torchwood about this version of the trope, because – without getting too sentimental about it – Cardiff has a very particular soul. It’s warm, and chatty, and nosy, with a touch of fatalism about its eagerness to find the funny in any situation. 

That’s not really something that gels with Tosh particularly well at first. Her history is such that the bubbly warmth of a full-on Cardiff personality like Fawzia’s can feel grating and intrusive. But over the course of a night which involves schlepping from one dodgy location to another in search of the gadget-grabber, both Fawzia and the fundamental nature of Cardiff’s personality gets under the skin of Torchwood’s most particular fish out of water.

Weirdly, there’s not a huge amount more to tell you without starting to compromise story threads and plot details. 

Certainly, there’s the intrigue of how a common-or-garden Cardiff thief gets hold of a gizmo that threatens not only himself, but the whole city and possibly much else besides. Certainly too, there’s the fact that it’s not just Tosh and Fawzia who are on his tail – and there’s a pleasing no-honour-among-thieves vibe in that sub-strand which pushes the drama along at a good but never over-frantic pace. 

It would be genuinely spoilerific to tell how the whole thing ultimately pans out, and you could argue, were you a cynical old bugger even compared to me, that the ending of the crisis with Chris the thief (Robert Wilfort) is a touch on the soppy side. But then, Cardiff is a touch on the soppy side, for all its sometimes hard-as-nails vibe, so for anyone who knows the city, the ending will feel more like a vindication, an act of natural justice, than something which deflates the drama of the preceding hour of not-exactly-cops and robbers chasing each other around the city. 

It probably helps, too, to understand something about South Wales vernacular and habits. In the Valleys (and in Cardiff), any driver of public transport, be it a bus or a cab, assumes the title of ‘Drive.’ If you thank them when they’ve dropped you off where you want to be – and you’d better, or every local will judge you – you acknowledge their skills and their position with a “Thanks, Drive” or even a “Cheers, Drive.” This is the unwritten law of South Welsh society. 

So while there’s the sense of an imperative about the title, “Drive” is not only a kind of shortened version of “Follow that car!” here. It’s almost a hat-tip of acknowledgement of taxi drivers everywhere. People who, as Tosh remarks, put themselves in positions of absolute uncertainty fifty times a day, not knowing who they’re picking up, or what dramas might come with them. 

When Fawzia picks up Tosh, there is blood, pain, drama, thievery, criminal danger, violence and a combination of alien technology and human skulduggery. But through it all, Fawzia and Tosh find themselves warming to one another. 

Will they hang out, go to each other’s birthday parties and the like after this? The obvious answer is no, but here’s the thing. 

Between David Llewellyn’s writing, a gooooorgeously likeable performance from Suzanne Packer, and a brisk but never breathless direction from Lisa Bowerman, you get the feeling that maybe – just maybe – they might. Certainly, Tosh has made more of a friend in Fawzia than she’s made in most other people in the city, and been taught to embrace its opportunities for interaction more. 

So, yes, just possibly. We can almost smell the spin-off from here: Fawzia – Time Drive. Certainly, if there were circumstances where everyone else had naffed off in the Torchwoodmobile and left Tosh behind, a reunion with Fawzia in audio would be entirely welcome, because the chemistry here is chef’s-kiss perfect. 

In Drive, David Llewellyn gives us another great slice of Torchwood, with a story that could be ordinary, but which is elevated by the central character-interplay between Tosh and Fawzia into something you’ll listen to again and again. 

You’ll listen not so much for the revelations of the plot, but simply for the joy of hearing these two people interact and warm towards each other, and the realism of Cardiff’s character and nature bubbling to the surface. As such, Drive hits harder on the re-listen front than its plot and premise seem to promise. More Tosh and Fawzia, any time you like, Big Finish. That’d be tidy.

Reviews Dead Man's Switch by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s dead now. And stuck on a train. That figures…

When Bilis Manger returns to Torchwood, it always sends a shiver down the spine. Murray Melvin, who’s played Bilis since TV Torchwood Series 1, always invests him with that spiderlike, almost playful quality, weaving hapless humans into one cocoon or another, with the voice and the manners of a sweet older man and the heart of a vicious black hole with teeth.

He’s baaaaaaaaaaa-aaaack!

He’s back in an audio drama from David Llewellyn, in a distinctly Cardiff, distinctly Torchwood and above all distinctly shudderworthy take on the classic Amicus movie Dr Terror’s House of Horrors.

The initial situation is deceptively simple – a train, somewhere in Cardiff. Three people jolt awake as the train stops suddenly – but each of them are firm in their conviction that the train should be going to a different destination. And none of them can remember getting on.

A fourth passenger, one Mr Manger, tries to make sense of their inconsistent beliefs. And then he raises the most peculiar possibility. Maybe they’re all dead, and the train is going nowhere, ever again.

And so, without so much as an evil chuckle, begins Dead Man’s Switch. The characterisation is this story is on absolutely another level to most Torchwood – and indeed, most audio drama – because the set-up is simple and static. Three people, one location, and Bilis Manger, urging them on to remember things about their lives.

Their stories are remembered strictly one by one, like ghost stories round a campfire, which allows the lives of the people on the train to be told mostly fuss-free and in their own voices, usually with only one additional character besides themselves. Both the focus of the narrative and the slightly claustrophobic feel of their lives draw listeners deeply into their histories, and each of them seem, while being entirely different and separate, to be tinged with a loneliness, whether of their own making or not. Their responses to that loneliness mark them out as individuals. Rowena is an older lady determined to fill her life with beautiful things, but also, dammit, determined not to be beaten any more at auction by the dapper older gentleman who’s gazumped her on several recent sales. Piers (well, it would be, wouldn’t it?) is a property moving bully-boy, a smart-suited city git with a contraceptive personality, who’s determined to scare an old man out of his business property so it can be bulldozed and expensive flats built in its place. And Zoe is a poorly-schooled but engaging single mother, whose daughter…is no longer with us. Zoe lives in a building about to be condemned, across a hallway from a nice old duffer who likes classical music and English breakfast tea.

Tale by tale, we hear of creepy goings-on in an empty house with a mysterious mirror, a Hitchcock-meets-Dracula problem with indomitable, small-bodied bats and an unfortunately positioned balcony, and a basement full of the sounds and noises of a baby in distress.

In each case, the passengers take us up to a moment of jump-scare, a moment of seeming tragedy or scream or death – and then they woke up on the train.

To explain what’s actually happened to them and why would be to blow the important plot details on which the whole story hangs. But are they dead? Alive? Trapped forever, Sapphire and Steel style in a limbo of nothingness? Bilis Manger has the answers, and while almost no-one on the train will be happy with what he has to tell them, there are reasons behind his actions, reasons why he too is on this strangest of trains.

Bilis Manger on audio from Big Finish has always had an edge – a cutting edge, if you will – that allows him to be above and beyond the normal toing and froing of Torchwood’s finest. But in 2018 release Deadbeat Escape and here in Dead Man’s Switch, he’s developing something of a theme, a determination to specifically sacrifice others to achieve his own aims. Something seems to be building for Bilis, and it’s building in a scary ladder of traumatic stories, of innocence and evil, action and inaction, all with an inevitable ending that pulls no punches. Torchwood in 2019 has given us some hard, heavy subject matter – everything from Night of the Fendahl and its dabbling with snuff movies, to The Hope, dealing with serial child murder. Dead Man’s Switch is less immediately punchy with horror than either of those releases, but it also gives you much less wiggle-room to look away from its central premise, because the linear nature of the storytelling means there’s nowhere to cut away to, nothing to relieve the pulse after pulse of tension as it builds. Here, the horror creeps up on you, unseen in empty rooms, or lures you, Stephen King-style, to its basement and then locks the door. Your investment in the characters is what’ll make your heart beat faster in this story, your need to know what really happened to them drawing you along until – boom! The answer looks right back at you through your own eyes.

Torchwood – Dead Man’s Switch is a creepy, contained, claustrophobic listen that takes you into three lonely lives and shows you the consequences of your actions in a social world. It will drag you in and turn you inside out, and, in the way that the best horror stories always do, it will leave you unsettled and thinking long after you’ve stopped listening.

Reviews The Green Life by Tony J Fyler

Tony goes green.

The idea of bringing back classic Doctor Who monsters and dealing with them in new, Torchwood-appropriate, more adult scenarios is a fundamentally great thing in principle.

Whether what you get as a result of doing it is a fundamentally great story depends on how you handle and balance the elements.

The Green Life brings Jo Jones, who has now appeared on TV with a New Who Doctor and alongside the Kate Stewart iteration of UNIT in audio, on a mission with Torchwood’s Captain Jack Harkness, back to the one-time mining town of Llanfairfach, where the computer known as BOSS and the giant green maggots grown at the bottom of its mining operation were once intent on taking over the wooooorld!

It’s been a while between visits. Llanfairfach isn’t the same place it once was – there’s an evolution of the Nut Hutch in the town, and a focus on providing ecologically sound, ethically sourced protein-based ready meals and ingredients to the world at large.

So why are Jack and Jo coming to town?

An unexplained death, a degree of disbelief…and a memory of the maggoty shenanigans of an earlier time.

Here’s the thing. Every Who-fan, every Torchwood-fan, every nostalgia-fan is going to want to love this story – it’s the coming together of Jo and Jack, it’s the follow-up to The Green Death, it’s got giant maggots in it, and, not for nothing, it’s written by David Llewellyn, which is usually a cast iron guarantee of a good time.

But…

It gives me little pleasure to say this, but this Torchwood story feels rather like it misses its mark. On the one hand, the giant maggots of The Green Death are an intensely visual scare – everyone who ever saw them remembered The Green Death as ‘the one with the giant maggots’ because they’re enough to make you squirm, just by looking at them. On audio… meh. They sound fairly nondescript, because of course, what’s a maggot going to do to make them an exciting audio proposition? Now, Big Finish has strong form in overcoming the silent or simply roaring monsters – it’s delivered Weeping Angel stories and Drashig stories that both told effective stories and also scared the pants off listeners. But with the maggots, other than their trademark, still rather small-scale hissing, there’s little to be done to make them audibly awe-inspiring. That means you’re left with little option but to narrate-along-a-maggotfest, with Jo and Jack having to describe what they see, hear, smell and so on to deliver the oomph that a visual giant maggot carries with it in just a second or twosworth of screen time.

Apart from which, what we have here is a story that’s linear to the point of oversimplicity – it’s Jo and Jack, travelling to find the source of the maggots, squelching their way through a squishy soundscape of damp and mulch and occasional hissing, and then reaching that source, having one fairly important, exposition-heavy conversation with a third party (the revelation of which will absolutely double, if not triple down on the nostalgia factor of this release), Jack doing a thing for which he’s already fairly well-known, and then them going away again. Conversations along the way are great, and we get to catch up on some post-Green Death developments for Jo and Cliff – which again, is at least partly what anybody buying this release is looking for from the purchase -  but conversations en route to a conversation, followed by more conversations heading in the opposite direction leaves the listener echoing Elvis – a little less conversation, a little more action, please.

Ultimately, as we said at the beginning, any Jo fan is going to really want to love this story, and for the sake of everything we learn about her and Cliff, her and Jack (not for nothing, there’s a sprinkling of distinctly Katy Manning fabulousness in her conversations with Jack), for the fact that this is a legitimate follow-up to The Green Death and for a surprise or two towards the end, there’ll be enough here to satisfy the cravings they have. But in the fact that it doesn’t move far beyond the remit of Jo and Jack, giant maggots and Llanfairfach, it feels constricted by the short run-time into being only a hat-tipping sequel to the sprawling creepy madness of the original Green Death, rather than something which, given the time and space to evolve into, could have updated the ideas of the original on a broader canvas than either the budget could allow back in the Seventies or than the demands of nostalgia and fan-service within a one-hour release allow on audio today.

Reviews Torchwood - Instant Karma by Tony J Fyler

Heads explode. Tony walks by, whistling…

Great science-fiction is frequently about asking the ‘What-if?’ questions of life, extrapolating from where we are and changing one thing, making one thing possible that isn’t, and seeing what kind of world you end up in.

Instant Karma sells itself openly on that premise – what if you could make all the annoying people pay for their tireless campaign of making the world worse? What if you could repay the inconsiderate git in the supermarket or bank with the bagful of penny pieces, make them hurt for their thoughtlessness. What if you could make the driver who cuts you up at a corner feel the impact of his behaviour, feel your anger as pain.

What if the anger of a protest could hurt, could even kill, the person being protested? If instead of a satirical blimp, you could make their heart explode, or their brain melt, or you could make them tell the truth? What if you could change things on that level?

Would you do it?

Sci-fi with philosophical underpinnings? Big tick, Big Finish. Big tick, David Llewelyn, James Goss and Jonathan Morris, who, somewhat unusually, deliver instant Karma as a triple-credit.

The story itself is anchored by Tosh (Naoko Mori), seemingly shortly after the Greeks Bearing Gifts TV episode, when she’s recently become aware of how her colleagues really feel about her, having briefly gained the ability to hear unguarded thoughts.

There are two other main players that make this a solid three-hander, Johnny Dixon as Simon (bus driver by day, self-help group guru by night), and Sara McGaughey as Janet, who loves him, whether or not he returns her affection.

The triple whammy writing team of David Llewellyn, James Goss and Jonathan Morris is unusual for Torchwood at Big Finish, but here it means that as well as the strong philosophical questions at the heart of the action, there’s a lot of solid character background given for Simon and Janet, which means we understand them as very different people, united however briefly in a moment of something potentially wonderful, potentially deadly. Simon in particular has a complicated, believable history that we learn as he tries to get to know Tosh better. Ultimately though, Instant Karma blends a couple of strong messages together in its storytelling. On the one hand, you can listen to it as a parable of how anger can make you powerful, but power can turn ordinary anger into a deadly force. And on the other, you can listen to it as a parable about not letting anger change who you fundamentally are – if, for instance, hurting people is wrong in one case, the wrongness or irritation-factor of the people doesn’t change the wrongness of inflicting pain. There are moments in Instant Karma when Simon and Janet are on the same side, and moments when the differences behind them, their needs, their self-soothing methods and the ways in which they process both the anger they have and the power it brings them show them to be very different people. And that, in the end, is what brings the conclusion its power, as each pathway has a destination-point, and ultimately, while Tosh may work for the super-duper secret organisation, it’s not she who decides the outcome of events in the story. If anything, it’s she who learns the lessons laid out for her by the examples of Simon and Janet, and, we can only assume, uses them to get over her sent of violation and outrage at knowing what everyone really thinks of her, to understand that processing anger in a healthy way is a mark of individual progress, individual conquest of the hot, powerful basic instinct to repay hurt with hurt.

Instant Karma’s a very impressive three-hander, with both Dixon and McGauchey delivering the drama, the realism, and the fundamental philosophical questions in persuasive and powerful ways, and Naoko Mori working well as the actual driver of questions and learner of lessons. Pick it up, and remember, if people are being annoying, that’s on them. How you respond to them…that’s on you.

Big Finish Reviews+ Cicero Series 1 by Tony J Fyler

Is Ciceronem mira, says Tony. With a bit of help from Google Translate and a Latin option.

When the first Cicero story, Though Scoundrels Are Discovered, was made, it was my pick for ‘release of the year’ from Big Finish – a Roman ‘detective’ story, with Marcus Tullius Cicero (lawyer, lawmaker and orator whose words continue to echo in our understanding of justice, power and due process today, played here by Samuel Barnett) and his brother Quintus Tullius Cicero (George Naylor) treading carefully through the pre-Imperial Roman world, where to cross the Dictator, Sulla and his friends was a terminally bad career move. It was Roman crime fiction with a superstar lead and a cast of nasties, that played like something between Mickey Spillane and John Grisham, with a final oration that sang with an erudition that seems somehow alien today, but which fans of President Obama, or hell, even fans of The West Wing, would recognise as having that ‘fire up the spine’ tingle that exalts us to be better than our base instincts. It was absolutely firecracker stuff from writer David Llewellyn.

If you’re going to make a whole series out of Cicero though, while it would be tempting to go the straightforward route of ‘lather, rinse, repeat’ and simply involve him in a sequence of cases without changing or evolving the character or his situation, Spillane-style, if you’re going to hold a modern audience’s attention, you have to focus on the people, the personalities, the power and the consequences of your actions. If you’re going to have a central character who, while pompous, is an archetypal ‘man of principle in a dirty world,’ you have to show what those principles cost, to him and those around him, otherwise we don’t buy in to the dirt and the danger.

Happily, Llewellyn is no newbie at this kind of thing, and neither is he any kind of slouch. Cicero, Series 1, does exactly what we’ve said it does – it focuses on the people in Cicero’s life, and the consequences of the young, upstanding lawyer being quite so young and upstanding in a world run by a Dictator (we use the capital advisedly, as it was an official title, that would eventually be overwhelmed by a line of Caesars).

In this series, we start off with that pilot episode, which established the Brothers Cicero – Quintus rather more disreputable and fun, while having an excellent ear for language and drilling his elder brother on making his words count in ‘court,’ and Marcus being somewhat priggish and overcautious of his dignity, but having those principles and that work ethic for which we can still admire him.

Moving us forward from that taster though, Llewellyn shows us Marcus, now suddenly a name to watch, choosing his next case, and coming up against a friend of Sulla’s, the altogether plausible senator, Claudius Decimus Arenius (played by Ben Arogundade with a fabulously massive voice, rich in intonation). While Quintus wants him to take a case of hedge-war between neighbours (one of whom is promising to pay – in actual, useable money!), Marcus finds a case of potential fraud in the slave trade, that means worming his way into the affairs of a political mover and shaker. That brings consequences to the whole Cicero family – and yes, there’s a whole Cicero family! Across the course of the series, we meet the senior Ciceros, Marcus Tullius gets a wife, Terentia (played with a glorious line in placidity laced with intellectual fire by Laura Riseborough), and we meet the in-laws too, including her father, Terentius, played by Jon Culshaw. Along the way, there are slave stories, accusations of impropriety with a Vestal Virgin, prostitution, mutilation, conniving with powerful figures – Sulla himself makes some appearances in Series 1, voiced by the note-perfect Paul ‘Treacle Tonsils’ Clayton, and an eventual victory that is at best mixed with disappointment and regret. It all reveals a world tainted with a spreading corruption, where the word of the Dictator creates its own reality, and if you happen to be a fact that doesn’t fit with that reality, you can be ironed out. With extreme prejudice, if necessary.

Which obviously bears no resemblance to our own world today. Not even a little bit. Nope, not a jot.

But besides the stinging, visceral picture of a world falling off from even the idea of the virtues it previously espoused, there’s also the progress of a brotherly relationship between the Cicero Boys that’s pressured by expectations from outside, by family loyalties and position. There’s a marriage which while still relatively fresh is threatened by a figure from Cicero’s past. There are dear friendships renewed, only to reveal how much has changed since they were last a vigorous bond. And ultimately, in a sequence which might be said to be just sliiiightly self-indulgent but is easily forgiven, there’s a choice for Marcus Tullius – whether to be, beyond a shred of doubt, properly, truly happy in his life, but to be forgotten shortly after his death, or to be prone to attack, to misery, to the plots of devious, deadly foes, and have his name spoken, revered and respected for a thousand generations. It’s a moment even younger listeners will appreciate, because it’s the central dilemma of the Harry Potter series – to do what is easy, or to do what is right. Llewellyn doesn’t overly sentimentalise that dilemma though; he clearly shows us that in this case to do what’s ‘right’ also flatters Cicero’s vanity and his view of his own potential. Still though, the point of choosing between an easy, pleasure-filled life and one fraught with difficulty and danger is clearly made.

Cicero, Series 1 is rich and gritty and rough and cultured and corrupt and principled and violent and complicated and brilliant and above all, emotionally true. It’s everything life could be under Sulla, the Dictator. It’s also five and a half hours of continuous drama (there are six episodes in Series 1, each around the 55-minute mark), created by a single writer as a single release. That means the chances of a second series probably depend on the mind and the calendar of David Llewellyn. Get Series 1 right now, and immerse yourself in Cicero’s world. Then join me in a plea for Cicero, Series 2, sooner rather than later.

We all need Cicero in our lives. This version of the great man, written by Llewellyn, is purpose-built to hold a mirror up to our own world, and give us a chance to believe that even when all is going to hell, we still have an individual choice to make, to be part of the problem or to stand against it, to be comfortable or to count, to do what’s easy, or to do what’s right.

Plus, it’s cracking audio drama to boot! Go. Go now – get Cicero, Series 1 in your lugholes!

Big Finish Reviews+ Serpent in the Silver Mask by Tony J Fyler

Tony kills everyone.

Any Ealing comedy fans in the Hub?

Doctor Who has proven over time (and particularly on Big Finish audio, where it speaks more to hardcore fans than to a TV audience of families) that there’s almost no genre, no style that can’t be adopted and adapted to become a cracking Doctor Who story.

The Serpent In The Silver Mask, by David Llewellyn, is Kind Hearts and Coronets in a time-locked, paradox-proofed space station.

Except, actually it’s better than that makes it sound. First of all, take a moment to appreciate how hard it actually is to write a Kind Hearts and Coronets-style story in Doctor Who. For those new to the idea, Kind Hearts and Coronets is a gorgeous, classic black and white British comedy where Alec Guinness plays every member of an unspeakable family, including the outsider, the interloper, who, in order to receive an enormous inheritance, kills them off one by one in a series of delicious, dark, funny ways. The point about Kind Hearts is that you know in advance who the murderer is.

Now, the point of a Doctor Who story of course is that there be mystery – something for the Doctor and his companions to unravel, puzzles to solve, clues to interpret. So Llewellyn gives us Kind Hearts meets Agatha Christie, on a base if not exactly under siege, then at least under lockdown.

Add to that a local law enforcement officer who’s at least as suspicious of the Doctor and friends as he is of any of the obnoxious family members, and then remember that this is the early Davison Tardis, with no fewer than three companions to find something to do, and you begin to see the scale of Llewellyn’s challenge in The Serpent And The Silver Mask.

The fact that he utterly knocks it out of the park is almost miraculous. Nine out of ten writers would get it horribly wrong. This is time ten. It’s a joy, this story. It’s the kind of story you want to finish, and then loop straight back to the beginning to listen to again.

There are very few, if any, undotted i’s and uncrossed t’s here – why are the Fifth Doctor and his Tardisfull of friends on Argentia, a giant space station out of sync with the rest of time? Because where locked-off time and real time meet, you get a kind of crystalline growth, that’s why – time fungus, if you like. And what are those crystals useful for? Well, one thing they’re useful for is building new sonic screwdrivers. Everything about that makes perfect sense within the Fifth Doctor’s universe.

From there on in, the Doctor and Co are almost co-opted into the funeral of Carlo Mazzini, the head of a most unusual family. For reasons that also make perfect sense within the script, every single member of the Mazzini family is played by Samuel West, and once the will is read, the hunt is on to unmask a killer before they plough their way through the entire family.

There are sympathetic robots, unsympathetic robots, a detective who’s out of his usual league, red herrings galore, a wonderful variety of murders, lashings of brisk and deliciously dark comedy, a flirty Tegan, a chatty Doctor and Things For All The Companions To Actually Do. The result is a glorious romp with grisly murders, with all the high-profile guest cast adding layers of texture to the fun. Samuel West is staggeringly good throughout, Peter Davison’s on form, Phil Cornwell adds some gruff gravitas as Superintendent Galgo and a supremely punchable robot as Zaleb 5, and Sophie Winkleman as Sophia, secretary to Carlo Mazzini, brings a breezy and increasingly infuriated voice of authority to bear as the Doctor and his friends try to track down the killer.

While Tegan’s getting soft and somewhat sweet with a member of the Mazzini tribe, and Adric is disappearing up ventilation shafts, finding bodies and being attacked by severely creepy dolls, Sarah Sutton’s Nyssa, going gloriously against her usual serene stereotype, is getting stroppy and irritable – ‘It’s horrible,’ is her summary judgment on the Argentia station, and she dislikes almost everything and everyone she meets from there on in. She’s the paranoid android on this trip, finding pretty much everything absolutely hateful. To be fair to her, most everyone she meets is a member of the Mazzini family, and a bigger collection of screaming grotesques it would be hard to imagine. West, as the whole horrible lot of them (with, possibly, one exception – spoilers!) is magnificent, and the rest of the cast turn up their game to 11 to play along with him. As in Kind Hearts, the gender of the family-member is no bar to him, and neither is age or accent – there are a pair of thoroughly revolting yuppie twins, all ‘Yah, totally,’ and ‘I know, right?’, there’s a grand dame with access to perfume and poisons, there’s a kind of ‘bluff Northern businessman’ uncle, and the time-travelling son of Carlo Mazzini, the initially-deceased, who feels almost born for Alan Bennett to inhabit. All of them are conjured into life by West, and you believe utterly in the reasons why such a thing would be possible and necessary, allowing you to sink into the adventure and enjoy every mad, funny, dark, grotesque, wonderful minute of its madness.

The Serpent In the Silver Mask is almost two hours that pass like one, so engaging is the writing, so en pointe the performances. It’s one that, once you’ve heard it, will always float up in your mind when you contemplate re-listening to something.  It’s a stylistic experiment that could have gone so very very wrong, but in the hands of Llewelyn, Barnaby Edwards on crisp directorial duty, and a cast that feels like it’s having enormous fun, The Serpent In The Silver Mask proves that such stories can be utterly triumphant.

Who Reviews The Taking of Chelsea 426 by DJ Forrest

Written by David Llewellyn

For BBC Books

Published 2009

Doctor Who has always been about Dystopian futures, so terrifying that we can only imagine what it could be like. Trouble is, ten years or so on from this novel, we’re about to embark on a dystopian world grown from people’s desire for change, but then not in the way some envisaged when they popped their vote into the ballot box.

This story may not be set on Earth, but the centre plot, the characters, their attitudes towards Newcomers, and the general feel of the story, and, to be honest, many of the books I’ve read thus far, in my reviewing of Who novels, have all had a feel of life on Earth as it is since the present Prime Minister was elected. Turn every page of the novel, read every bickering comment from a settler on Chelsea 426, and you’ve the bloke across the road, the bloke on the telly reporting the news, the man in the White House, and whoever else is in power, threatening strife which will in turn threaten us all.

Chelsea 426 is having a flower show, exhibiting flowers that are not from their own planet, but were captured as spores in a cloud and grown and nurtured, and now the head honcho wants to share his plants with the ‘world’ or Newcomers, travelling from far and wide. But as you find, this plant has a few little side effects for anyone who stands too close – and sooner or later, you're singing to a different tune, exhibiting behaviour unlike your true self, and you don’t much like the new arrivals from the planet Sontar.

There’s something almost comical about the NuWho Sontarans that I like, over the frightening ones back in the ‘70s that scared the very pants off me. These seem to at least form a coherent sentence, and are often challenged by the Doctor, who for once, so far (haven’t finished the novel yet), hasn’t been fired at or threatened with certain death.

The Sontarans are on the planet to seek out the Rutans, their age-old enemies, who have made their way to Chelsea 426, only of course, the residents blame the Newcomers for the troubles that now face the planet, and insist that the Sontarans arrest and detain them – but of course, the Newcomers, have brought nothing with them other than the desire to view beautiful flowers that are extremely rare. And in true Chelsea Flower Show fashion, I imagined many other less interesting exhibits to build up the momentum of the big reveal under the glass dome, where many hundreds of people would eventually succumb to flower power!

There are some interesting characters that have hit home for me, the state of our own world, our judgemental attitudes to others. Our disregard for how we should behave – how children should be kept at chores and not enjoy growing up – and not mark every teenager as a waste of space, likely to clutter up the high streets in groups, chewing gum, dressing inappropriately, threatening and noisy.

We expect so much from the people around us, that we forget that it’s not them who need to change, but ourselves. There’s a lesson to be learnt in all the Who books from 2007 – 2010, that are beginning to ring true of our lives today.

Reviews Visiting Hours by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s in for more than a routine procedure.

There’s a flippant observation that can be made about most great literary or TV detectives: sooner or later, they become the equivalent of a Jonah, attracting death and devastation wherever they go. It’s the inevitable product of a meta-universe: we the audience want more from them, more murder, more mayhem, more of them getting to the bottom of unspeakable crimes, ergo more unspeakable crimes happening around them than would be the norm for any real human being. In essence, our desire to see them solve cases makes their life less believable than it technically should be.

We mention this because there’s something of that vibe about Torchwood – Visiting Hours. Torchwood itself of course has a get-out-of-WTF-Free card: it has a rift on its doorstep to deliver it monsters of the week or weirdness by the bucketload – that’s its job, so for most of the Torchwood crew, alien weirdness is their bread and butter. But Visiting Hours, by class act David Llewellyn, stars Rhys, Gwen’s anchor to normality and chips, and his mam (it’s a Welsh thing, go with it), Brenda. They’re actually the anti-Torchwood, the norms, the anchors, the honest, ordinary Welsh people into whose lives Torchwood has been thrust because come rain, shine or the end of the world, Rhys loves Gwen, and Gwen is Torchwood. That means Brenda should be able to have a routine hip operation without attracting the attention of nasties from Elsewhere.

When it turned out that’s actually not possible, there’s an intellectual disconnect to a the non-Torchwood Torchwood story that follows, involving only Rhys and Brenda against the weirdness that would normally be Torchwood’s business – it feels, to come full circle, like they’ve been hanging around the weirdness too long, so now they’ve become an anchor for it, because we the audience want to hear how they’d cope on their own.

That said, Visiting Hours gives a believable lesson in the way that being around alien weirdness changes the way you think, be it Torchwood, or the Doctor, or Sarah-Jane’s crew, or UNIT. You stop thinking in the lazy, easy, comfortable clichés that are the bread and butter, the sunrise and sunset of most people’s lives. You learn to spot things that are wrong, that are out of place. Presumably, you drive people stark raving mad by a kind of hyper-alertness to potential weirdness in what they just accept as the world. Remember in Who when the bees were disappearing? Once you’ve been exposed to enough alien weirdness, presumably you start to question headlines like that immediately.

Rhys, played as ever by the reliably naturalistic Kai Owen, certainly pricks up his ears the instant weirdness finds him and his mam in this story, and switches from his normal, everyday mode as haulage guy and mammy’s boy to Children of Earth-style warrior, survivor, outwitter of the forces of alien bastardy.

Brenda – the ever-peerless Nerys Hughes making a very welcome return to the world of Torchwood – is in hospital for a hip replacement. Hospitals of course function very well as an alien environment: the impersonal surroundings; the anodyne maze of confusing corridors; the imminent body-horror of surgical procedures and the inherent trust we place in the hands of strangers, giving up ourselves or our loved ones to the skills we suppose they must possess. When Rhys, arriving late for visiting hours, is allowed to stay through the night with his recovering mam, another element of hospital strangeness is very effectively highlighted here – while by day, they have the appearance of public access and openness as temples of healing, hospitals by night have a much more forbidding persona, more in line with prisons or asylums. There are inmates and there are staff. Except perhaps in Accident and Emergency, outsiders are generally not allowed.

Anything can happen in a place like that.

In Visiting Hours, Llewellyn explores the nature of that fear, with an extra dose of body-horror that has a resonance in a Britain where there’s a great deal of need for donor organs, and a donor register from which one has to specifically opt out. One of the greatest fears of those who choose not to donate their organs is that somehow, the prize of a bodyful of spare parts begins to outweigh the usefulness of a living human being, so doctors are disincentivised to do their best to save their patients, because either way they win, but quite possibly, they win bigger if older patients die. That’s a fear Llewellyn taps into here.

When Rhys overhears a group of organ-snatchers from Elsewhere dragging living patients off for harvesting, Visiting Hours takes on the tone of a Michael Crichton medical malpractice movie…only Welsh. Dark creepy corridors, a pair of intelligent, driven organ-hunters with an eye on Brenda’s innards, and only Rhys and what he’s learned from his wife and her alien-arsekicking mates between his mam and a body bag. It becomes a base under siege story, with the organ-hunters working to a very specific – and highly plot-significant – deadline, to at least give our hero a chance. Rhys and Brenda, the latter bed-bound and morphine-dripped for the pain of her operation, have to find a way to neutralise the hunters and survive till morning, when, they hope, the hospital will revert from being a shadowy place of nightmares and unethical practice back to a place of brightness, help and healing.

Llewellyn puts the pair through the ringer, while exploiting their on-screen dynamic and taking it forward, she is chastising him for his language as he quickly accepts the necessity of going into warrior mode, he biting back at her for her overly nitpicking suggestions and directions, bringing up memories of endless trips to rainy Welsh seaside towns and her back-seat driving when he was a child. Despite the sniping of these stressful moments though, there’s never any doubt that this pair is a proper Welsh Mam and Her Boy – her pride in his accomplishments is cast iron to the point of absurdity, his love and gratitude to her makes him do the things he needs to do for her, because above all else, he wants her to be ‘right,’ to be comfortable and as happy as she can be.

Visiting Hours is not just a nightmare run through dark corridors, outwitting two rent-a-baddies though. Llewellyn’s a better writer than to bother creating rent-a-baddies, and his villains here are villains only in the absence of context. Seen through another lens, as we get to see them eventually, they’re fighting for their own loved ones, just as Rhys is doing, and there’s a handful of late exposition that could well make Visiting Hours the otherwise-enclosed beginning of another series arc. These organ-snatchers are absolutely from Elsewhere…but where? When? And why do they need to come here to get organs? There are hints here that will set your mind reeling with possibilities and theories of what’s to come.

Those late developments, and the questions they make us ask, give an underpinning to Visiting Hours that stop it from being just ‘Rhys and Brenda Versus The Baddies.’ Not that there’d be anything wrong with that – even on that level, Visiting Hours would be an entertaining listen, because the double act of Kai Owen and Nerys Hughes in these roles, clearly relishing each moment of their time together, is both heartwarming and hysterical, and the idea of what someone like Rhys, who’s been exposed to the necessities that Torchwood’s fight entails, but isn’t one of the ‘cool kids’ with the weapons and the brilliance, would do when he finds himself forced to defend his family against the forces of a mundane evil, would be quite enough to make Visiting Hours what it ultimately is – one of the easier Torchwood audios to listen to, bombing along on the creepy environment, the threat of the hunt, and the relationship and the dialogue between these two Everylistener characters. But the extra twists that come towards the end give Visiting Hours a solid forward-spin of plotting and potential, without having gotten in the way of all the running throughout this funny, scary, ultimately heartwarming hour.

You’ll come back to Visiting Hours when some of the Torchwood audios’ more emotionally draining hours feel like too much (Yes, Broken, we’re looking at you), but when you want something darker than, say, the frothy fun of PC Andy’s Ghost Mission. The balance between the character dynamics, the continual chasing pulse of the threat, the creepification of the hospital environment, and the plot-seeding at the end makes Visiting Hours an attractive listen on whatever level you want, giving you things to think about once you’ve finished, without necessarily keeping you up at night.

Reviews Torchwood: The Conspiracy by DJ Forrest

Written by David Llewellyn

Directed by Scott Handcock

Produced by Big Finish

Music by Murray Gold

Cue the intro and the new upbeat and funky theme tune by Murray Gold.

Torchwood is BACK!

Immediately I feel a sense of loss for the old theme tune but it’s soon forgotten as the story gets underway.  Jack Harkness tells a portion of the story and you know it’s Jack, because there’s that old bouncy, excited, voice of the Torchwood Captain, that I didn’t feel was there in ‘Another Life’ narration from John Barrowman, until the 2^nd disk when the story picked up after Jack was attacked by the creature in the bath. 

Torchwood is definitely back, that old feel of the great coat, the squeal of the tyres of the SUV thundering along the streets of Cardiff.  This is the old series and for that I’m hyped and excited as the old Captain himself. 

There are new characters and a newer story to tell, as well as reminiscing about old cases.

I couldn’t give you any spoilers even if I tried.  Not because Big Finish might rap my knuckles or I might offend and upset all the fans and the writers and the people I admire, but just because the hour long story is so crammed full of plots and interesting characters, and so much detail that I wouldn’t know where to begin. 

The Big Finish audio drama is a lot different I feel to the old BBC audios.  I can’t put my finger on it, but there is a difference.  I never thought we’d ever hear from Torchwood again, and I’m so glad that Big Finish picked up the baton and ran with it, and I look forward to the next story with utter glee and excitement, because if this story is anything to go by, then I’m curious to see how they’re going to top it. 

Stay on after the end credits, don’t be in a rush to quickly put the audio away, or restart the disk.  There are four great interviews and all worth a listen. 

Only one gripe I guess, the front cover looks a lot darker than the poster that teased us for the first story of the new season.  Yet they say, never judge a book by its cover, and so I feel that, that says a lot about this story by David Llewellyn. 

It’s brilliant!  So worth the wait! 

We asked the fans what they thought of the new story and avoiding all Spoilers, here are their views. 

Claudia Lindner Love it, cleverly written, great story! It has the Torchwood feeling; John as Captain Jack is awesome, brings the whole Torchwood atmosphere back. Other cast is very good, too. The new theme is fantastic, brings something new, but picks up the Torchwood we know. Gripping story, I can't wait for the next ep. Captain is coming for them!

Alice Osborne Gripping story, the entire cast is fantastic, as are the interviews at the end. Torchwood is back!

Gary Gillespie I really enjoyed it, heard it today, so glad Jack is back!

Ianto Tarrant Good start, loved hearing Captain Jack again....

Interviews The Conspiracy with David Llewellyn by DJ Forrest

It’s been a long time coming – the return of one of our favourite sci fi dramas, and although it’s not back on the television screen but audio, it’s still something to celebrate.  When the news came through that Big Finish were going to be broadcasting the audios, our resident Weevil dove for cover, hands over his ears, eyes tightly shut as we whooped loudly in the office.  Yes, dear friends – Torchwood is back!

The title of the new audio released by Big Finish is The Conspiracy but the details of the story are still a mystery – much of the description is blotted out like a WWII telegram.  It gave us something to whet our appetite though, and as ever I wanted to know more.  So I asked the writer of the new story David Llewellyn to shed some more light on the new range of Audios by Big Finish.

Hi David, are these the TW audios that John Barrowman announced earlier on this year that will involve the full team?

David: These are indeed the audios that John Barrowman announced earlier in the year! I was asked quite early on, back in late 2014, to write a spec script for a possible first episode, but at the time didn't know how many episodes were being planned. But yes, as announced on Sunday there will be six episodes in total, including mine.

Are you writing, or have you written more than one story for the series of audios that are coming out?

David: At present, I've only written 'The Conspiracy', but I'd love to write more Torchwood. It's always fun.

Back in our first year, when we interviewed you as part of the Consequences novel - Baby Farmers - is the story ‘The Conspiracy’ set in the past or the present?

David: It will fit within the series' continuity, so I guess you could say it's in the present, but it's set before the events of Children of Earth.

With Torchwood off the air on the television, how will the stories play out, given the last we saw was Miracle Day and read The Exodus Code - which direction will the stories take, and will they be like many of the old Classic Who dramas, that continue to play individual stories long after the series has ended. 

David: I've honestly no idea, as I haven't read any of the other scripts that are in the pipeline. But there's so much scope with audio plays, as there is with novels, to tell stories that are simply too ambitious to attempt on screen, and there's plenty of unexplored Torchwood and Captain Jack history, too. As for how this series will pan out after 'The Conspiracy', we'll just have to wait and see!

So there you have it.  Torchwood is back and the new story will begin in September this year, with the next story in January till May 2016. 

You can pre-order ‘The Conspiracy’ on the Big Finish website. http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/the-conspiracy-1294

The physical CD audio is £9.99 but you can order a digital download for the much cheaper price of £7.99.  If you’re anything like me, you’ll want the hard copy, to read the inscriptions and admire the artwork by Lee Binding. 

‘The Conspiracy’ is directed by Scott Handcock.  It stars John Barrowman as the awesome Captain Jack Harkness, John Sessions as Wilson, Sarah Ovens as Kate and Dan Bottomley as Sam. 

It was recorded on 30^th April 2015, and if while you’re on the Big Finish website, check out the awesome photos of John Barrowman recording his parts from the studio in LA. 

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/the-conspiracy-1294/behind_the_scenes

Definitely worth a view. 

Thank you to David Llewellyn for our Torchwood interview.  The Author photo is by Jon Pountney.

Reviews Trace Memory by DJ Forrest

Written by David Llewellyn

ISBN: 978-1-846-07438-7

Published by BBC Books 2008

Michael Bellini worked on the docks with three other co-workers, Frank, Hassan and Wilf.  It was November 1953.  Waiting on the docks in the chill of the night for a delivery of a crate, the four men talked idly about the usual stuff folks do when passing the time.  Watching from up high were two government men in bowler hats, Agents Cromwell and Valentine.

When the crate was craned off the boat and touched the ground, something inside it began to hum, to throb and exploding out in all directions the crate was blown apart, the four men were thrown off their feet, the nearest killed but buried under one part of the crate lay Michael Bellini, one side of his face bearing the stencilled logo of....Torchwood!

The story of Michael Bellini takes us back and forth through time, where he and a visitation of men in bowler hats are seen by each member of the team, at various points in their life, but it’s Jack’s life that it touches the most, and it’s Jack who is rocked by the final visit from Michael in the D-4 Archives in the Hub, in present day Cardiff.

David Llewellyn’s story picks up on a lot of historical detail of Cardiff through the ages.  Names of characters in the novel are the best way of thanking someone for the historical help they have given, by writing them into the story, look out for some familiar names linked to the acknowledgements at the back of the book. 

As with all Torchwood novels, the details to the characters are not overly described because we know them so well, there’s no need to over complicate things.  I found I could pick up on expressions knowing the characters reactions to a good many stresses during the story, including Owen’s need for the bathroom when moving from one particular spot could render him incapable of tying his own shoe laces let alone being able to pee.

I’d like to visit Cardiff again sometime if only to locate some of the areas in the story that I’m certain really do exist, or if they don’t, then I’m sure with the powerful imagination I possess, I’m sure I could conjure them around the locations that they should be situated in.

If you enjoyed the story about the Time Traveller’s Wife, then this is quite similar although Michael doesn’t age.  The events are happening to him in such a way that he doesn’t grow younger or older.  As he catapults through time, it feels as if only a matter of hours or minutes have passed, which in a sense is similar to that of the ‘Traveller’ in the Time Traveller’s Wife novel from what I remember of it.  Although memory in that novel meant that the traveller forgot certain moments in time, Michael remembered every event but wished for the end to come so that he could rest, so that the men in bowler hats with the sunken black eyes would stop hounding him, for inside of Michael was something that they wanted back. 

 

©BBC Torchwood 2006