Big Finish Reviews+ The First Doctor Adventures Vol. 5 by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s feeling ruff.

The First Doctor Adventures sets with the David Bradley cast have often followed a tried and trusted formula – one space or futuristic story, one Earth historical, more or less by way of capturing the spirit of those early black and white years before the historicals were largely phased out. 

It’s a combination that works well on audio, because it shows how the medium can deliver the drama, meeting both challenges with the same central cast. 

Volume 5 sticks with this winning combination, giving us For The Glory Of Urth, by Guy Adams – and no, that’s not a typo – and The Hollow Crown, by Sarah Grochala. One space, one history. Everybody clear? Good, let’s go adventuring. 

Doctor Who has almost always been a great platform for satire and allegory. By spinning events on our recognisable Earth off into a science-fiction setting, it’s been able to entertain and inform at the same time. It’s also been able to let writers a little off the leash and give their take on things. This sort of freedom is what brought us Terry Nation’s views on the idiocy of Nazi ideology, wrapped up in a personal tank and called a Dalek. It’s what gave us Kit Pedler’s fear of a lost humanity through organ replacement surgery, wrapped in bandages and called the Cybermen. It’s what gave us Robert Holmes’ scathing indictment on commercialism culture, the shop window dummies who fought back, known as the Autons. Holmes, again in a scathing mood, created the Sontarans as a satire on big-minded militarism. And let’s not forget what happens if you send Robert Holmes and excessively high tax demand – you end up being mercilessly parodied in the Sunmakers, that’s what.

If there’s a writer in the audio world of Big Finish who most precisely channels Holmes’ ‘better writing through satire’ abilities…it’s probably Guy Adams. There are other great comic writers in the Big Finish ‘stable,’ but no-one quite sticks the knife into modern life and makes it bleed pure science-fiction satire like Adams. 

Strap yourself in when you listen to For The Glory Of Urth – it’s almost too close to the bone of real life in the 21^st century bone, while simultaneously being a highly effective futuristic science fiction story. 

The Doctor and his friends materialise on Urth, where all that remains of the human race suffer a godawful life under the grinding rule of an arrogant upper class who make regular proclamations of love for the proles, while demanding they go without more food, work harder, or take the option of being destroyed, to – in almost as many words – decrease the surplus population, for the good of Urth. This is a society in which the upper crust is so singularly, pointlessly pleased with itself, it strives to maintain nothing less than species purity – there are regular scans for people with any alien DNA, and if it is found, they are immediately part of the underclass, or possibly just tortured and killed for their outsider nature. 

There is also a generic, uncomplicated, shamefully recognisable ‘fear of the alien,’ on the grounds that Urth is the last outpost of the ‘inherently superior’ human race, and that aliens want to come and destroy that precious, proud heritage, either directly by war, or through underhanded co-mingling. 

In a sense, Urth is an outpost of fascism for cretins, and pleasingly, both the Gallifreyans and the 1960s humans are revolted by what they find there. The story develops in ways that are simply sublime in the second half of the running time, but to tell you much about those developments would be very much a spoiler. Suffice it to say that the assumptions on which the first half of the story is based are perhaps not as sound as they’re made out to be, and when Guy Adams’ story blossoms and we get to meet some actual potential alien invaders, the parallels between the current world of Brexit Britain and the world of Urth and its tin-pot little ‘Feel sorry for me with my burden of command’ rulers become positively “chef’s kiss” perfect. 

Clive Wood as Daddy Dominus, the self-important, self-pitying is perfect in terms of being jussst far enough from observable reality to be a legitimate science fiction performance, and the double act of horrorshows that are Mummy Martial (Amanda Hurwitz), the chief strategist of Urth, and Sissy Cruciatu (Susie Emmett), its chief scientist and torturer (Err…yes, it’s that sort of a world) are the kind of venom-spitting odd couple that made some of Eric Saward’s sharpest stories zing. 

Be aware, the world of Urth is no fun. Spending too much time there would be nauseating in the extreme, like living in a UKIPtopia. But the writing and the performances that make Urth come alive are so sublime, you’ll go back for many a re-listen to this story. You won’t be able to stop yourself, it’s just that cathartic, like squeezing a really ripe spot. 

And speaking of “Out, damn spot!,” after what seems like a solution to all the early First Doctor’s navigational troubles, in The Hollow Crown, the Doctor manages to get Ian and Barbara back to Shoreditch. 

Just…under the rule of the wrong Elizabeth. 

Yes, we’re back in Elizabethan London here, in the company of William Shakespeare. There are delicate Doctor Who timelines not to disturb on both counts this far into New Who territory, especially as the First Doctor won’t be aware of any of them. 

Sarah Grochala’s story navigates these elements with a seeming ease, without at any point ducking them. Also, unlike celebrity historicals in the Tennant era, when those elements were set up, there’s no wink to ‘camera’ about these things here – they’re just presented as the standard perils of time travel, while the story itself digs deep and hooks you in. There are rogue plays, rabble rousers, cross-dressing red herrings, a friend of the queen and an ill-fated rebellion here, all of which the Tardis crew have to navigate. 

Add to that some really sparky crew dynamics, with Susan doing her best ‘sulky Earth teenager’ act in the company of a son history says Shakespeare doesn’t have. Barbara, meanwhile – relatively fresh from her experience with the Aztecs, and similar experiences in recent audio adventures too – is determined to stick her neck out and tell the rebels that they’re doomed. And for once, it’s Ian who’s equally determined to see exactly what might be changed about the history we think we know. It all makes for a heady, involving drama that zips by much faster than its run time will have you believe. 

Oh, also, it stars Wendy Craig as Elizabeth I, than which nothing better exists in this vale of rampant what-the-hellery. 

Bradley’s Tardis team has long settled into their roles, and with the always slightly unnerving fact that Claudia Grant sounds more like Susan when she’s just being Claudia Grant than when she’s acting as Susan understood, they’re a highly enjoyable team. It’s worth giving additional props to Jemma Powell as Barbara this time out too, especially in The Hollow Crown, where Barbara’s role is superbly well-written and realised. 

All in all, For The Glory Of Urth and The Hollow Crown are extremely different stories, with similarities in their underpinnings. They each make us look at some things we think we understand from a brand new angle, and they both do so while very firmly determined to tell a great story first and foremost. 

They succeed all along the way, which means the First Doctor Adventures, Volume 5 can stand proudly alongside its predecessor sets – which, given the quality of this range, is both never necessarily a given, and is really saying something. You have to work almost ridiculously hard to turn out stories this engaging while being true to both the spirit of early sixties Who, and to the spirit of enhances adventure that 21^st century audio allows. Everyone involved in the First Doctor Adventures, Volume 5 works that hard, and the result is a set that delivers on every level.

Who Reviews Galaxy 4 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s other robot is a Chumbley.

It’s an odd affair from start to finish, Galaxy 4. The First Doctor, Steven and Vicki land on Planet Nameless and are having a traditional ‘let’s see who can capture us first’ walk about when they encounter a Chumbley. It’s not really a Chumbley of course, it’s possibly one of the most useless robots ever devised (although admittedly the Dominators might later have a thing or two to say about that). But Vicki, with the vaguely imperialistic tone of a space-time traveller, names it a Chumbley because, she says, it moves in a ‘chumbley’ way.

O…K then. In itself, it’s a nice little piece of characterisation – the young space adventurer naming what she sees in quite a twee and ‘sixties-girlish’ way, and her male companions going along with it in an indulgent, somewhat patronising style, as though she’s just announced that everyone knows Father Christmas is real.

Chumbley or not, the robot’s possibly threatening, so when it’s attacked by a posse of space vixens, there’s a certain debt of gratitude to be paid, and Steven is at first very…shall we say…’sixties-man’ eager to pay it. It emerges that these are the Drahvins, mostly-cloned warriors under the command of their uncloned and therefore ‘real’ leader, Maaga. They’re basically Sontarans with better hairstyles – and you’re more than welcome for the nightmares that concept brings you. The point of all of this is that the Drahvins, while they look appealingly humanoid on different levels, are actually a ruthless, not to say potentially murderous bunch.

As the story evolves beyond ‘let’s wander round a bit and get into trouble,’ writer William Emms does his duty by the science fiction audience – the Drahvins and the Tardis crew have landed on a planet with a lifespan measured in days, and the Doctor, by virtue of some fairly mysterious calculations, is able to radically shorten their estimation of how long they have until the world goes bang. That adds another dimension beyond the big ticking clock – because the Drahvins and the Tardis travellers are not alone on the planet. The Chumblies don’t belong to either party, but to the Rills – a reptilian race, feared and loathed by Maaga, and so by her crew. But are they as bad as everyone thinks?

That then is the heart of the drama of Galaxy 4. Beyond the ticking clock of the planetary explosion, and the occasional awkwardness of Steven left behind in a captive role on the Drahvin ship as a hostage against the Doctor and Vicki’s good behaviour, it’s a story of perception versus reality. Fake news, if you like, versus the truth. Because the Rills are gruesome-looking beggars who breathe differently to us. These fundamental differences feed both Maaga’s fear and her ability to see them inherently as ‘lesser’ creatures than the Drahvins – and therefore she feels justified in taking their ship to effect her escape from the exploding planet, while leaving them to die in the coming inferno.

Which is worse? The people who look and breathe differently to us, but appear to mean nobody any harm, or the people who are ‘like us,’ but want to negate and destroy ‘the other’ for their own benefit?

Galaxy 4, while including a good deal of sitting around in spaceships and trudging across a clock-ticking planet surface, actually delivers plenty of sci-fi for your viewing dollar – the cloned race of Drahvins, the reptilian Rills, a big ticking clock to keep the adventure running, but above all, it gives us a modern human dilemma: how do we treat people who are different from us in some superficial, or indeed fundamental ways? The remit of science-fiction is to ask the questions that apply to our world, in new, contextually divorced ways that make us think about them while we enjoy some technologically-enhanced adventure. And right there in 1965, William Emms delivered us that on a four-episode plate in Galaxy 4. You could argue it doesn’t matter who the ‘Rills’ are in our society – certainly, as time has moved on, the identity of the ‘other’ has changed. In the mid-sixties, the most potently newsworthy ‘other’ for a British science-fiction audience was likely to be immigrants of colour coming from across the Commonwealth. In 2019, the Rills are immigrants from Syria. The central dilemma of Galaxy 4 is simple, and therefore timeless – it’s the question of how we who have the bigger guns, the more engrained opportunities, choose to respond to people we’ve been told should frighten us. Will we follow Maaga into antagonism, rejection, thievery and destruction, or will we, like initially Vicki and ultimately the whole Tardis crew, accept the ‘other,’ work with them for the benefit of all, and ultimately realise that fundamental differences are actually immaterial when you’re all in the same boat – or indeed, on the same imminently-exploding planet.

It’s the timeless quality of that message that allows Galaxy 4 to still have an impact beyond its simple set-up today, and while the story is mostly missing in terms of its visuals, there are great audio renderings of the story that can still bring it wholly home to you. Hartnell’s Doctor here is semi-mystical in performance while being all about the science in the script. Peter Purves has said he wasn’t terribly happy with his as Steven Taylor role in the story – the role he took on in Galaxy 4 was initially written on the understanding that Ian and Barbara would still be in the Tardis, and his was the Barbara part (though it’s interesting to imagine Galaxy 4 with the strong and logical schoolteacher in play, rather than the headstrong space pilot, and it certainly would have made for more strongly obvious parallel with our own world to have a female 1960s schoolteacher in the mix of this particular story). And in any assessment of the story, you have to pay tribute to Stephanie Bidmead as Maaga, who gives the Drahvins their blueprint both physically and in their strength of conviction and warrior zeal, making them a species that live on in the DNA of Who-fans to this day as something beyond the ‘space vixen’ stereotype they could easily have become. Compared, say, to early Star Trek alien females, they’re not falling into trysts with the hunky space pilot – the Drahvins are actually the face of blunt-edged warlike authority, and you’d be a fool to treat them lightly. Ultimately though, the most wide-eyed, open-minded fun across the four episodes is brought by Maureen O’Brien as Vicki, who first properly questions the narrative of the Drahvins, and who bridges the gap between that narrative and her fellow Tardis travellers, allowing for a dialogue with the Rills, and ultimately a solution to the problem of the exploding planet – for everyone prepared to get on board. And of course, lest we forget, she gives us one of the most immortal robot-names in the history of Doctor Who. She gives us the Chumblies.

Galaxy 4 is a story which itself ‘chumbles’ along, sometimes slowly, sometimes at pace – but the ground it covers in its four episodes is impressive in the intensity of its sci-fi ideas, and timelessly relevant in terms of its message.

Big Finish Reviews+ An Ideal World by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s been to Paradise…

Half the trick in writing a truly memorable audio Doctor Who story in in the evocation of a period, with the conventions, the speech patterns, the feel of episodes from a particular window in the show’s history. If it feels right, you’re halfway home before you get to the monsters, and the philosophy, and the politics of a story.

An Ideal World initially feels very right. It’s a script of the kind that the William Hartnell era rendered very well – the Tardis crew arrives on a world, wanders about a bit, gets into previously unsuspected trouble, and meet a bunch of people to whom they represent little but an unconscionable headache. Then things get more complicated and the time travellers help to solve the problems the planet reveals itself to have. So far, so Galaxy Four.

Here though, this is just the way in to a story that’s more complex, more broad-minded and more downbeat than anything the Hartnell world would have served up. And, with both Vicki and Steven coming from our ‘future,’ it’s an example of a story where the Doctor can be far more a citizen of the wider, more all-encompassing universe than perhaps he would ever have felt able to be when he was accompanied by two schoolteachers from 1960s Earth.

The ‘ideal world’ of the title, known as T-19, looks like it could be an Eden, which is extremely good news for the crew of the Magellan, a colony ship fifty years out from Earth and getting increasingly desperate to find a place like home to put down roots.

But…

There’s always a but when people are looing for Paradise. Here, the but is initially found in politics and ethics: for once, humanity is determined to expand its frontiers only if it can do so without the wholesale extermination of indigenous species of flora and fauna, setting the crew of the Magellan into factions supporting either Captain Traherne (played with a convincing determination to do the best for her people by Carolyn Pickles) or the ship’s leading Ethicist, Kay, played by Angela McHale. Kay was ultimately defeated in the election for the Captaincy (Yes, in a delicious sardonic note, leadership on the Magellan is an elected position, rather than one based on any particular competency for the role). The conflicting interests of a captain whose position depends on T-19 being fit for colonisation, and therefore free of any intelligent life, and an ethicist with an axe to grind and a point to prove gives the life of the Magellan crew a twist of deep human reality.

When the Tardis crew are separated, Steven falling immediately in among the Magellan exploratory team on T-19 and the Doctor and Vicki hiding out from organic peril in a cave, writer Ian Potter gives us a solidly evocative late-Hartnell era trope – the Doctor falling dangerously ill, and spending the mid-section of the story coughing up a lung, falling into a fever, and being helped slowly back to life and fitness. Meanwhile, planet T-19 has surprises in store for any would-be colonists.

Those surprises, on the face of it, could have been ridiculous. But Ian Potter, Lisa Bowerman on directing duties, and the cast do their best to show the dark potential that lies behind the secret of T-19. There’s life on that there planet, but probably (to coin a phrase) not as we know it. Where then does the ethical line get drawn? How far does the self-interest of the Magellan crew override any ethical concerns? And, come to that, does the life of T-19 propose to let its destiny be decided by the newcomers?

While the Doctor’s medical worries are addressed (by the medical and scientific nous of none other than space pilot Steven Taylor no less), the ethical and political questions, and the tensions between the two leading women on board the Magellan rage, with a bit of almost incidental stompy monster action thrown in, culminating in the proposed colonisation coming to the brink of an inter-species war for possession of the planet. The cunning thing in all this is that you can genuinely see the validity of both positions, Traherne acting for the constituency she’s sworn to represent and Kay, despite an increasingly vivid personal stake in removing the captain from office, showing a much broader, more inclusive view of what life is and why it deserves respect. As the story draws to its climax, there’s a touch of Animal Farm at play – you can ‘look’ from one of these women to the other and find it hard to tell the fundamental difference between their entirely human blend of ethical intentions and savage self-interest.

The end of An Ideal World is also a kind of Romeo And Juliet In Space, inasmuch as it could so easily have gone a different way and finished with smiles and laughter and everything being alright.

It doesn’t go that way.

Everything’s not alright.

There’s murder and missiles before teatime, and the Doctor, who let’s not forget has spent much of the story on his sickbed, has the chutzpah to disapprove of everyone – a plague on both your planets! – and pull his companions away from what feels to them like an instinctively right desire to stay and help the crew of the Magellan in their future endeavours.

The evocation of the later Hartnell era in An Ideal World lulls you into a false sense of black and white security. The story itself is a highly nuanced modern political and ethical commentary, with some gloriously detailed hard sci-fi twined through it. After The Dalek Occupation Of Winter, this feels like a busier story with a fuller, more detailed world in the Magellan crew. Like Winter before it, An Ideal World gives us a First Doctor story in which there’s more oomph, more impact than almost any of the televised Hartnell adventures, while playing out its drama with a darker edge than all but a few of those stories dared to deliver.

Big Finish Reviews+ First Doctor Adventures, Vol 2 by Tony J Fyler

Tony looks better in black and white.

When you have a core cast of four people, two of whom have sadly passed away, and you’re making new stories for an entirely re-cast version of the original, tone matters.

Of course, tone always matters, but particularly when there are four new voices in the roles of four much-watched and highly-studied characters, tone reeeeally matters.

Tone is a thing the First Doctor Adventures, with David Bradley re-inventing the First Doctor, has been very particular to get right. Breathe. Relax. You’re very firmly in First doctor territory here.

What we mean by tone of course is that there’s a difference between First Doctor stories and Fourth Doctor stories, and a different difference between First Doctor stories and Twelfth Doctor stories. The kinds of stories that they told in the First Doctor’s era almost feel like a time capsule now. They did a lot of ‘evil aliens being mean to nice people, let’s defeat them’ stories, to be sure, but there was a distinct sense also that in the First Doctor’s time, the science fiction could twang off on an entirely random philosophical angle which later ages wouldn’t allow, because of all the running and shouting that had to be done. And of course the First Doctor’s time is the golden age of the ‘pure historical’ story, where there was no alien threat at all, merely the events of history themselves in which our heroes got mixed up.

There’s one of each kind of story in this set, and that’s what reinforces the absolutely unique First Doctor flavour of the set. Just as stories like The Aztecs, Marco Polo, The Web Planet and The Keys of Marinus could only be First Doctor stories, so too could The Invention Of Death and The Barbarians And The Samurai, by John Dorney and Andrew Smith respectively. All of which of course helps sell the reality of the re-voiced Tardis crew, who this time out seem to have stopped trying to be their TV counterparts, and started just being them, leading to a more convincing – and therefore involving experience all round.

The Invention of Death is an experimental mind-melter, which reminds us of The Fragile Yellow Arc Of Fragrance (Google it, or search for it on the Big Finish website), in that it’s sci-fi with a very strong sense of difference from everything that’s familiar to us. It’s like The Twilight Zone with aliens or Black Mirror with charm, and that means you listen hungrily to the full length of the story, even though if you dare to pause, you can sketch out where it goes. The point is it’s so very interesting, conceptually, that you want to find out how it gets where you think it’s going. The Tardis crew land on a planet where there are androgynous, semi-morphous people, whose life is mostly taken up with playing games. No sexes, no houses, no sickness, no want, no need…no death. No reproduction.

All could and should be well in such a world, of course, but they have their games – which they play by hurling razor-sharp javelins at each other. There are no consequences if any of them get hit – they self-repair quickly and go on with the game.

They like their games.

When there are strangers in their midst, they want to share their games with them.

See what I mean? You can sort of see where it’s going fairly early on, but it will still take a turn or two to surprise you. By bringing the very concept of ‘death’ to this world, and therefore the concept of healing, the Tardis crew set a miniature revolution in motion – things can be learned in a society where people die. Knowledge becomes a burning need in a society like that. But someone understands that all too well, and starts spreading death among the citizens. Can the Doctor and the fledgling scientists of Ashtallah find a cure for death, stop the killer, and introduce the notion of reproduction to a world on which it has never before been necessary?

John Dorney’s script is classic and does the thing that’s most coherently the province of early Doctor Who – it dares to imagine the entirely unlike, not just extrapolating from life as we know it, but in the truest terms of science fiction, asking a big what-if – in this case, what if there was no death, and never had been?

David Bradley…

OK, let’s put this out there. David Bradley was a truly masterful William Hartnell in An Adventure In Space And Time. He was as good a First Doctor as he was allowed to be on screen in Twice Upon A time.

David Bradley has found his home as the First Doctor at Big Finish.

What’s more, all three companions feel like viable alternative-dimension versions of the characters we know this time out, all helping to bolster the reality of what you’re listening to, and make it feel like part of the run of adventures you know. In story terms, it’s also true to the First Doctor era by giving almost everyone something to do, but leaving Susan something of a third wheel as Barbara’s injured, Ian’s on a quest and the Doctor’s involved with the scientific shenanigans of a world without death. It might not give Claudia Grant the best of deals in terms of story-threads, but The Invention Of Death is a solid slice of highly inventive, speculative and philosophically searching science fiction which holds true to the tone of the televised First Doctor.

Susan typically faired rather better in the ‘reasons for being in the drama’ stakes when the story was a pure historical, and so she does here in Andrew Smith’s gorgeously researched and sumptuously rendered The Barbarians And The Samurai. What we’ve got here is an abbbbbsolutely nail-on-head perfect First Doctor historical, but with perhaps a pinch or two of modern spice to prick up your tastebuds. Finding themselves in 19^th century Japan, during a period when no Westerners were permitted in the country, our heroes have an immediate problem – and one where their apparent ethnicity is an issue (a rare one for pure historicals, to be sure, but still one that anchors the story in the reality and the nature of the times). Finding themselves split up, the Doctor and Barbara are taken to the palace of the local daimyo (a mayor or sheriff, but with a personal army of kickass Samurai to do his bidding), while Ian and Susan are forced to hide out, and are rescued from a vicious Samurai attack by a so-called ‘peasant’ who kicks way more ass than a simple peasant should be able to. On the road to getting the team back together there are palace intrigues, mysterious men in masks, double- and possibly triple-dealing plots to break the rules of exclusion between Japan and the West, a seemingly doomed love story and a massive ‘how the heck are we going to get out of this one?’ late-game cliffhanger that forces the Doctor and Ian to turn scientific sorcerer. Smith is a master at multi-stranded drama, and this might even be considered a jewel in his already intensely impressive crown, because he balances all the elements here on a Samurai blade – the pacing is fast, the action plentiful, the intrigue elements believable without requiring anyone to be stupid to make them work, and the tapestry he creates is rich and broad, meaning you feel like you’re listening to a proper Hartnell six-parter, without it ever feeling overstretched (because of course, it’s actually just a four-parter). It’s an immersive, full-on historical that really can hold its head up alongside the likes of Marco Polo, The Aztecs and The Crusade.

Bottom line, if you’re a fan of the kind of Doctor Who that really only existed within the first three years of the programme’s history, you need to listen to this – the cast have gelled well together, the scripts are highly polished, and the overall experience is of slipping in a DVD of one of the classic black-and-white adventures, but without the budget restraints that might have lessened their visual impact. Go back and travel with the first Tardis crew again, for adventures that are broad and beautiful in a less canon-cluttered, more anything-goes universe.

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.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Dalek Occupation of Winter by Tony J Fyler

Tony feels a shiver down his spine.

Sometimes in a tried and tested format, you need new people to bring new angles on familiar things. You need new brains through which to filter old ideas to make them truly fresh again. Truly bright again.

Truly terrifying again.

Step forward, David K Barnes, we think we love you.

The Early Adventures series of stories from Big Finish was launched with the aim of rounding out the kind of stories which had been told in the Companion Chronicles line, but with a broader scope and more voices, while still holding to the ‘narrated scenes’ style of storytelling, rather than the full cast, no-narration option of the Main Range.

That said, we open the fifth series of the Early Adventures with a story that’s at least mostly told through cast voices, and where the narration has a distinctly natural flow, mostly used simply to condense chunks of scene that could otherwise feel tedious. Five series in, Big Finish knows what it’s doing, and having found writer David K Barnes, has reached a place where the narrated scene format flows seamlessly over the length of a full four-part story.

As to the story…ooh, it’s a dark one. We love a dark one.

There’s a Dalek on the cover art, and Dalek in the title, so there’s a good chance you think you know what you’re in for – shouty shooty extermination-fests ahoy, right?

Well…

Certainly not at first.

Think more Power of the Daleks than Resurrection of the Daleks. Think more political commentary than festival of firepower. Think about how, for instance, there was a time when we didn’t check our Twitter feeds every morning to see what 3AM absurdity had come out of the White House. Think about how normal it is to do that now. Normality is just the name for what happens every day. People can be conditioned by repetition to think the most absurd and gruesome things are normal.

Welcome to Winter.

Winter is the only real spot of warmth and brightness on a cold, ice-wasted planet. Winter is a city, with a leader (the superbly slippery Robert Daws as Gaius Majorian) conditioned to a pampered life ruling over the unwashed frozen plebs. It’s a city with a great manufacturing industry, geared to the production of one particular item, apparently in great demand in an eager cosmos, and a city which has a regular, Tripod-style selection of the best and brightest to join the research division that helps make the economy work. The research division that consumes their every waking hour for the rest of their lives, so they kiss their family and friends goodbye and go to serve a higher purpose.

It’s a society with Daleks. Non-exterminating, non-devastating Daleks.

A society where Daleks are normal. A society where Daleks are good.

That’s really the point of the title – this is not The Dalek Invasion of Winter. No no, this is an occupation, insidious, inch by inch, changing what the ‘normal’ is for a whole society, then establishing a husk around that normal, so no-one questions it. It’s not that they don’t dare, just that there’s no reason to. A society working in harmony with the Daleks is just…normal.

And then out of thin air come the First Doctor, Steven and Vicki.

Dissenting voices, shouting that the (ahem) Dalek ‘Emperor’ has no clothes on. Dissenting voices, bringing a different way of looking at everything that’s normal – the manufacturing industry, the selection, the way the whole society of Winter is structured and run.

Steven finds himself working on a production line alongside Amala Vost (Shvorne Marks), whose brother Kenrik has proved himself the cleverclogs of the family and gone to the research division. Steven tries to overcome one of the central fallacies on which Winter survives, while Amala tells him that he’s utterly wrong, but even if he were right, she and many like her would still need a job in the morning or they’d starve to death – the norm is frozen into her bones and accepted there.

Vicki finds a friend in Gaius Majorian, tells him the truth she knows about the Daleks, which troubles him greatly…or does it?

And the Doctor, while feted by the city’s rulers, discovers someone perhaps as dangerous as the Daleks themselves, a person who can watch the norms of their reality break down, and take dispassionate control of a crowd for their own bored and morally exhausted purposes.

Definitely a dark one.

For all that though, the darkness is like a slow, slow poison, and Barnes’ script, under the direction of Lisa Bowerman, takes us through the everyday highs and lows and freezing cold of Winter, giving us our lovely moments of character interaction, of friend-building, of shock and triumph and tragedy as we uncover the truth of what Winter is, layer by increasingly cold, dark layer.

There’s not a performance here that wavers from ideal – Peter Purves continues his unbroken run as the most evocative post-Hartnell voice of the First Doctor, while getting the chance to give us some Steven-as-would-be-revolutionary into the bargain. Maureen O’Brien conjures up the young, loquacious innocence of Vicki in a way that makes us feel for her heart when her confidence is misplaced. Robert Daws gives us a masterclass in political chicanery, Matthew Jacobs-Morgan as Kenrik conjures the vulnerability of a young soldier about to go into battle as he prepares to spend the rest of his life in the research centre. Shvorne Marks shows us the ‘ordinary people of Winter’ in Amala, their loves, lives, needs and concerns encapsulated in a performance that makes you smile. Sara Powell – oof, you want to pin back your ears to listen to Sara Powell as Jacklyn Karna, and Nick Briggs gets if not exactly to relive his Victory of the Daleks performance of a Dalek biting its theoretical tongue, then to come somewhat closer in this more rational script to the sustained, restrained Dalek malevolence of Power of the Daleks.

In short, The Dalek Occupation Of Winter is an absolute belter with which to launch the fifth series of Early Adventures, its energy strained like a high violin note, its life vivid in its ‘normality,’ and the performances slick and sharp and hopeful by turns as the arrival of the newcomers and the questions they ask brings the reality of Winter to the unwilling light of day.

Feed it into your ears today and prepare to shiver.

Profiles Susan Foreman by Tony J Fyler

She was the original Unearthly Child – the first key, the first curiosity that led two teachers to a junkyard in Totter’s Lane and led us on a journey into time and space. As such it’s perhaps fitting that we still, several decades later, know very little about Susan Foreman as a character.

Certainly of course, Foreman’s not her name. Whether Susan ever was her name before she and her grandfather arrived in London in 1963 seems dubious in the extreme. But just like ‘the Doctor’, it’s a name she appears to have chosen, and by which she’s identified during the whole of the life we see and hear her lead.

Susan, in common with all the original Tardis team, goes on a journey through her time in our eye. When we meet her, she’s agreeably odd and quirky, and according to the story we’re initially fed about the Doctor and his granddaughter, they are ‘exiles,’ cut off from their own planet and people for reasons they’re not keen to share. But it’s Susan, as much as Ian and Barbara, who first forces the Doctor’s hand, with an immature, foot-stamping ultimatum – she’d rather leave the Tardis and him than the 1960s and the teachers who’ve become embroiled in their remarkable reality. The ultimate teenager, the proto-adult, stuck between being protected by humans who are in so many ways more clueless than she is, and being protected by her grandfather, who is clever, but sometimes needs to be reminded to be kind, Susan exists in a kind of awkward limbo – she’s bright, precocious, highly skilled in some areas, and at least has a fairly strong telepathic propensity, meaning she regularly reminds us that she’s not quite what she seems to be, not quite the gawky earthly child she looks like, but so much more, while at the same time going through a kind of Time Lord puberty, never sure of where she belongs if not by the side of her grandfather.

It’s a loyalty of course that becomes co-dependence – they’ve been through so much together, both before we meet them and afterwards, that the thought of leaving him to go on alone without her, without the last prop of his life on their home planet, is almost literally unthinkable, at the expense of her own happiness. By the time her grandfather shuts the doors on her, it’s a complete reversal of her first on-screen temper tantrum. Rather than leaving the Tardis and him rather than get a thing she wants (the kind treatment of the Coal Hill teachers), it’s her grandfather who has to do the difficult thing, because he knows by then that she never will – she’ll help him with every breath that’s in her, and at the expense of her own happiness, which he can see lies with a very earthly man. She cries to get back in, to be allowed to help him again, like she always has since they fled their homeworld. But he knows what she can see but can’t allow herself to feel: she’s grown up enough to deserve her own adventures now, and they begin in the eyes of a new man, not an old one.

Susan Foreman is very often the oddest of glue that keeps the initial Tardis team together – she’s an alien as mysterious to the teachers as her grandfather is, with a shared history, and the shared if imperfect, growing knowledge of science and history which brings those teachers to her home in the first place. But she, far more than the Doctor, is actually fond of human beings, she’s the one who forces him to get to know them, to try, against his high-minded and haughty instincts, to care about them as individuals, rather than as players in a drama of history and exploration. What started in a junkyard becomes a grand spirit of adventure, the Doctor eventually says. The reason it does anything of the sort is Susan Foreman.

Profiles Ian Chesterton by Tony J Fyler

Tony Fyler steps into a police box in a junkyard.

The original Tardis team was envisaged as being 'something for everyone' to reinforce the family nature of Doctor Who, but they were also each their own companion archetype. Susan the young girl to whom the mysterious Doctor was a mentor. Barbara, the voice of both insatiable curiosity and moral scruple as it was envisaged in 1960s Britain. And Ian, the brave if reluctant adventurer, doing the 'man's work' - all the heavy lifting and all the heavy fighting that the girls weren't socially 'allowed' to do, and the Doctor, as the champion of the intellect, wouldn't stoop to, however necessary it was or however much he benefited from it.

From the beginning, things were never entirely that cut and dried – the First Doctor buckled a good swash on occasion and was about to stove a caveman's head in when Ian stopped him in the very first adventure.

Ian is more than an archetypal hero though. From An Unearthly Child onward, he's the more light-hearted of the two teachers kidnapped into time and space, chuckling at Susan Foreman's oddity, while for the most part, Barbara is perplexed and worried by it. He's the one who gives voice to the absurdity of the reality they come to inhabit - 'a thing that looks like a police box, standing in a junkyard, can go anywhere in time and space?' - and he's also very much the most practical of the original companions. Shouldering much of the responsibility for moving the story along, it's often Ian - in stories like The Dead Planet and The Keys of Marinus - who sees a straightforward path to the adventure's end and rolls up his sleeves to help get the travellers to that point.

While he's initially furious with the Doctor for kidnapping them, Ian comes to terms with the reality of the situation relatively quickly - if there's no direct route back, there's no direct route back, and that's all there is to it - and quickly it becomes Ian, more than Susan or Barbara, who becomes what we would later understand the fundamental companion to be: the viewpoint of the audience. Susan, who was initially supposed to fill that role for the children watching, never quite managed it because her character after all was supposed to be as alien as the Doctor was (for all she degenerated in the writing to that other companion-staple, the screaming one who gets captured and has to be rescued). Barbara became, most of the time, rather more rigid and schoolmarm than her normal character was, when she was faced with regular peril. But Ian was most often the logician, getting things straight so that he could find the solution, the pathway through time and space that would lead them all home. In essence, he was ‘Dad,’ the one who could be trusted to take care of the hard things, whether it was getting involved in complex French history and the journey of Marco Polo to the system of governance on leading rebellion on strange new worlds. He was Dad, certainly, but he was Dad with a dressing-up box and the heart of an eight-year-old boy too.

Ian Chesterton was an everyman of his time, taken out of that time and thrown into the universe to sink or swim. That he swam so often was down to his nature as a very ordinary hero – treating the world as a friend until it treated him otherwise, strong in his support of the friends who are true to him, wide-eyed and marvelling at the wonders of the universe, but unafraid to stand on the principles his parents taught him, and put himself and those principles to the test in a good cause, or for a good friend. It’s Ian, right at the start, who teaches the Thals to stand up to the metal-plated Nazi attitudes of the Daleks, by bringing the evil of their philosophy close to home, as we can deduce it would have come for the very young Ian himself in a world of bombing and disappearing relatives gone off to war. It’s a scene that comes right back to haunt him the next time he meets the Daleks too, when it turns out they’ve invaded his home planet and he joins the resistance to their domination because, to paraphrase a later Doctor – some things must be fought.

Really, that’s telling about Ian Chesterton – for all the sixties were a time of division and change, they also had people like Ian in them: people who’d grown up with early memories of the war, and who, while embracing the world in general in a spirit of brotherhood, never shrank from saying that wrongs were wrong, and standing up for right, whether that came in the form of segregated living at home, or tin-plated pepperpots of death in space. That’s what Ian Chesterton is: a good man, with no enemy but those who choose to be, but who, through his exposure to the universe of time and space, is forced from time to time to go to war.

Of course, as is the case with many early companions, the audio stories of Big Finish have massively rounded out Ian’s character, background, beliefs and the arc of his life. It’s remarkable that many decades later, while sounding like an older man, William Russell has been able to recreate Ian Chesterton with the trademark chuckle, and the trademark dropping into firmness and resolution of the man we saw on screen, but also to infuse him through the audio scripts with a warmth for which there was seldom time on TV. His care for Barbara in particular is something that was generally only hinted at as a kind of shared-traveller impulse on the TV show, but through the audios, it’s given a greater voice, though rarely are we in Romeo and Juliet territory – that’s not who those people were. But a steadily growing need to have and keep each other in their lives, and close, is a beautifully subtle thread throughout the audios. Stories like Domain of the Voord, like The Flames of Cadiz, like The Rocket Men and like The Time Museum show sides to Ian Chesterton that Russell’s on-screen performance meant you always suspected, but which were never given the chance to come to the fore.

Ian Chesterton, friend of the universe, warm-hearted man with a sense of right and the courage to put himself between the innocent and the evil. In so many ways, the mellowing of the First Doctor’s alien spikiness – and to some extent the rationale for the Doctor’s fondness for travelling with humans ever since – can be laid as a tribute at Ian’s feet. When he stopped the Doctor killing the caveman in the first story, the point of human beings as a potential civilising influence was first made. In some ways, the Doctor has been trying to be as good as the very best of his human friends ever since.

Never cruel or cowardly – that’s Ian Chesterton.

Profiles Barbara Wright by Tony J Fyler

Of the two teachers originally kidnapped and whisked away into time and space by the First Doctor in 1963, it seems strange that it’s Ian Chesterton – chuckling, wide-eyed Ian Chesterton – who’s the scientist, and Barbara Wright – the more decisive, the straighter-faced of the two – whose discipline is history. She seems by far the more naturally inclined to be interested in the black-and-white world of scientific endeavor, and the world of multiple perspectives does not seem in any real way to suit Barbara’s personality.

It’s important to realise of course that the Barbara we see on screen is for the most part, Barbara in a very bizarre set of circumstances. Take Barbara right back to the beginning though, and you begin to understand some of her real core characteristics.

When faced with the mystery that is Susan Foreman and her odd, contradictory knowledge and behavior, Barbara decides to investigate, and when Ian suggests that really, they’re just curious about the mystery of the girl, Barbara reacts almost angrily, certainly furious with any suggestion in her own nature that he might have a point – ‘If I thought that was all this was, I’d go straight home!’ Barbara’s not motivated by a morbid or a prurient curiosity about the girl – as she says, if Susan turned out to be just ‘meeting a boy’ it would be so reassuringly normal. Rather, it’s concern that makes Barbara take the unusual step of following her home and demanding to speak to her parent or guardian. Concern at the gaps in her knowledge, at the bizarre specialization of her understanding of some other fields, concern for the future prospects of what Barbara instinctively understands is a bright young woman. For all the future impact of the Doctor’s companions, our relationship with him ultimately owes everything to the concern of a good teacher for her pupil.

That’s Barbara’s keynote – concern for people. And it’s when you understand that that her interest in history begins to make sense, because of course history is nothing but the study of people, their motivations, their actions and how they relate together.

While never actively seeking to attract people to her, it’s a quality that makes Barbara – who frequently seems a little unintentionally aristocratic – nevertheless someone to whom the people she meets on her travels instinctively warm. On their first trip to an alien planet, they discover a peace-loving race and a bunch of metallic oppressors (Barbara becoming the first person ever to be menaced on screen by a Dalek), and while she joins in the fight through a kind of fierce devotion to the idea that good people should not be bullied (her teaching instincts applied to the whole of the universe), she also inspires tender feelings in Ganatus the Thal, which she seems to return. But so soon after having lost everything she knows, Barbara is unwilling to leave that familiar life behind forever, and travels on with Ian, the Doctor and Susan.

This innate ability to inspire affection through her own compassion and concern follows Barbara throughout her travels – Susan herself comes to regard her much more as a friend and mother-substitute than a teacher, and it’s a role into which she more easily and comfortably fits when the Tardis crew pick up Vicki, having had by then some practice at allowing her natural compassion to flower in a maternal role.

But there’s more to Barbara’s compassion than romance and playing a parental role. Whenever people talk about Barbara, they inevitably bring The Aztecs screaming to the fore. It’s inevitable for a very good reason – it’s a tour de force for Barbara’s character, her determination that goodness is more important than the history she thinks she knows almost landing them in terrible trouble in The Aztecs. Barbara is the more inherently challenging of the two teachers on board the ship – frequently demanding how or why when the Doctor insisted a thing was so, where Ian, for the sake of a more direct route to the end of arguments, adventures and ultimately their originally enforced journey, would often simply accept the will of the pilot of their ship and do whatever was deemed necessary. You can over-analyse this and reach a deeper conclusion than was ever intended, assuming that whereas science teacher Ian saw things in that black-and-white way of the discipline – this is the world with which we’re faced, let’s get on with it – Barbara, with her historical understanding of perspectives and people, wanted to know why she should or shouldn’t do a thing. She was never obstreperous for the sake of it, never needlessly difficult, but Barbara, more than Ian, took her teaching instinct, her fierce determination to do the best thing she could, into time and space with her and applied it to the universe she found.

That’s never more strongly shown though than in The Aztecs, where, confronted with the Doctor’s determination to let people be sacrificed – both individually on altars and as an entire culture when the European invaders arrive – Barbara’s concern both for people and historic cultures burns through, and as the goddess Yetaxa she sets herself up in frank opposition to the wisdom of the time travelling old man. While as events unfold, history as the Doctor knows it proves unbeatable, it was the first time a companion had confronted the Doctor’s assessment of the universe in so blatant a fashion, and it would stand as one of the only times such a thing was done in Classic Who, though it was a question to be bitterly raised in New Who through the pleading voice of Donna Noble – ‘Save someone. Not everyone. Just someone!’ and the furious voice of Amy Pond – ‘If you don’t save everyone, then what is the point of you?’

That question, decades before, was essentially Barbara’s mantra in The Aztecs – changing history ‘for the better,’ and assuming she knew what ‘better’ meant because she had the foreknowledge of what was coming. In an age before the novel idea of ‘fixed points and flexible points in time’ had been developed, it was Barbara Wright, schoolteacher, who stood up to the Doctor’s long view of history and helped to change the old man for the better. He might be proved right in The Aztecs, but just as Ian had shown him a different way, stopping him from killing a caveman early in their travels, Barbara in The Aztecs shows him the power of compassion.

After the Doctor leaves Susan behind on Earth, it’s Barbara who instinctively steps in to take some degree of care of him, distract him from his wandering thoughts, knowing what he needs, and she’s also instrumental in helping him to accept Vicki on board. Ultimately though, when the opportunity arises in The Chase to leave the Doctor and her new vagabond lifestyle behind, it’s Barbara who weighs up the lives that she could lead and finds a universe of wonders can be forsaken for the simple joys of life on Earth. Ian, as was never really in doubt, follows her.

Sadly of course, Jacqueline Hill passed away before Big Finish was around to offer her the chance to broaden and deepen the character of Barbara in person, as it has done for William Russell’s Ian. She’s been well represented though, in stories like The Revenants, The Flames of Cadiz, The Dark Planet and, if you can get hold of it, The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance. Perhaps the last word on Barbara though belongs to Russell T Davies, who in The Sarah-Jane Adventures mentioned ‘Ian and Barbara Chesterton, professors at Cambridge,’ who it was rumoured hadn’t aged since the 60s. Barbara was a teacher first, foremost and always, and she found a way to use her compassion for young students and her enthusiasm for her subject, on a broader canvas. And there, in Cambridge, we can picture Barbara Chesterton, nee Wright, smiling at her class and at us, having acknowledged the love and care of Ian - her friend, her partner in adventures and eventually, her partner in life.

Who Reviews Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet by DJ Forrest

The Tenth Planet is the first ever Cyberman story and the last ever First Doctor story. It’s set on Earth in the South Pole in the year 2000, in a Space Station built under the snow, that tracks the lives of the astronauts in a space shuttle, desperately trying to return to Earth, when the Tenth Planet comes into view, and begins drawing on their energy.

From the start of the story the First Doctor is ailing. He’s ageing through the novel, and Ben the sailor, travelling companion in the TARDIS with Polly, a young girl who Ben calls ‘The Duchess’ notices more than once how old the Doctor is becoming.

The Cybermen are much different to those from later years, they, despite not showing any physical resemblance to humans, still seem to hold some of their elements. These, despite their silver exterior show a little humanity when Polly was taken to their space ship as a hostage, while Ben and the technicians worked in the radiation room.

They turned the heating up that kept their prisoner warm. I’m unsure if the Cybermen of today would have shown that much concern.

The Cybermen also were less abrupt in their confrontations with the humans in the Space Station on Earth. There was a touch of a human response in their voices. OK they did shoot and threaten to shoot some of the technicians, and they did eventually cut short the behaviour of the cigar chewing man in charge, but they weren’t all of declaring ‘Delete. Delete. Delete,’ every five seconds.

In fact, I don’t believe any of them uttered that at all.