Big Finish Reviews+ The Fourth Doctor Adventures Series 7A - by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s eight years old again.

When Tom Baker was eventually coaxed into performing in Big Finish audio adventures, reprising his role as the Fourth Doctor, there was initial joy, and then, when he delivered Destination Nerva in 2012, for me at least, there was a touch of sadness. His voice had changed, as voices do over time, and he sounded rather frail – the spirit tentative but willing, but the physical apparatus, if not broken, then changed to a point where it sounded inherently sad.

Spin forward, as you can if you happen to have a time machine, to 2018.

Tom Baker now, in 2018 (or 2017 when these stories were recorded) is the Tom Baker of the 1970s. His voice sounds rejuvenated, and, as he maintains in interviews, he’s found a job that gives him such pleasure, and brings him such love and adoration from armies of fans again, that his performances these days are as exuberant, as lightning-fast and layered and turn-on-a-dime as they ever were. Tom Baker is the Doctor in 2018, just as he was in 1978, and if you’re doing a job in your eighties as well as you did in your forties, then you’re an extraordinary person too.

Series 7 of the Fourth Doctor Adventures takes an unusual step, releasing the first three stories (two single-disc stories and a double-discer) both as individual tales and as a galumphing collection, a banquet of Baker to get your teeth well and truly stuck into, and there are things to say about it, but the first thing to do is go and buy it, because there’s not a disappointing story here.

First up, Sons of Kaldor. Kaldor Robots (the rather more politically neutral term for what everyone recognises as the Robots of Death), in the hands of Andrew Smith, a writer who’s always got a point to work around, and who builds strong stories with layers of characterisation and questions. You know that’s going to be good as soon as you read Kaldor Robots and Andrew Smith.

There have of course been a few different follow-ons from Robots of Death. There was a whole series of Kaldor City audios in the dark days between iterations of Doctor Who. There was a novel, Corpse Marker, and there was at Big Finish the Seventh Doctor story which introduced future companion, Med-Tech Liv Chaenka, Robophobia. Smith introduces us to another new way of using and seeing the Robots of Unfortunate Reprogramming, bringing the Fourth Doctor and Leela to a shipful of them, all of whom seem to have amnesia about their mission. When our time travellers discover two bodies in the medical bay, we’re invited to wonder what’s really going on, and to get it wrong. Smith builds a world outside the ship, a world inside the ship, and eventually brings the two into harmony and focus to build a bigger picture that makes sense of every conundrum he’s posed. You’ll fly through The Sons of Kaldor, partly because it’s the Robots of Freakin’ Death, but more because he yanks you through at speed, making you ask questions that have you impatiently waiting for the answers to come clear. The end pays off your curiosity, without ever making the answers too trite, too pat – there are still questions to ponder at the end, partly because the truth about what happens in The Sons of Kaldor is bigger than a single story can accommodate, but also, one sneakily suspects, because a sequel story would be lovely, thank you very much.

Having waxed lyrical about Tom Baker, can we talk about Louise Jameson for a moment? Louise Jameson has always been an enormously good, incredibly intuitive actor. On screen, she took a role that was supposed to be ‘Eliza Doolittle in a leather bikini’ and brought a sense of the bright child to her, making Leela feel ‘real’ in the most surreal of circumstances. Watch her in The Sun Makers, watch her in The Face of Evil or The Robots of Death, and see her being fully possessed of her own – Leela’s – thoughts and feelings, whatever the Doctor was doing or saying. She’s continued that great work at Big Finish, broadening Leela out in several stories, showing us how she thinks and feels as her time with the Doctor, and her time in the wider universe continues. The Crowmarsh Experiment, by David Llewelyn, isn’t exactly a Companion Chronicle, but it is a very strong Leela story, where she’s made to question the reality of her life, the certainty of her sanity and the boundaries of her trust in the Doctor, especially as someone who looks and sounds exactly like the Doctor is urging her to come back ‘to reality’ – the reality of a life on Earth in the 1970s, of a husband and children who want her back from the delusion of her life in time-travel. It’s a wrenching piece of character drama, and it’s arguably, by virtue of its depths and layers, the stand-out story of the set. You genuinely feel for Leela by the end of the piece, both in terms of the life she didn’t live and the fact that you’ve just seen a glimpse into a world for which she subconsciously yearns. It’s strong, affecting stuff, The Crowmarsh Experiment, and if you’re at all that way inclined, there may be teardrops to shed by the end of it.

The third story, The Mind Runners/The Demon Rises, by John Dorney, is probably the best sci-fi epic movie you’ll never see. It’s in the vein of a lot of eighties and nineties sci-fi that really took the genre forward – your Blade Runner, your Matrix, a lot of the best 2000AD – and like those other works, it unfolds, layer after layer, taking you from a teen trend, the idea of ‘mind running,’ or surfing into other people’s consciousness, to see through their eyes, think through their brains, through the highest echelons on the planet Chaldera, to several other levels and strata of society before you find out what’s really going on. Starting with the basic premise of mind running, the Doctor and Leela discover that mind runners have committed what looked like suicide, despite having no previously self-destructive thoughts or inclinations. There’s talk of conspiracy, and an urban bogeyman has grown up – people say the suicides encountered the Night Mind, a force of will so dark it corrupts anyone who comes into contact with it.

But while that would be story enough in some circumstances – and give a clear, linear battle for the Doctor and Leela to face, Dorney goes much much further to show us the world of Chaldera, from political forces worried about what the mind runners might be able to discover about what they’re up to, to police who are just trying to get to the truth of what’s happening, to interestingly psychotic semi-liquid supervillains, to cults who believe that the flesh is an abhorrence and only the mind (in suitably mechanical avatars) should survive, and more besides. There is such texture in Dorney’s world, and it’s all so oddly, believably realistic that you stand no chance of working out what really is going on from any kind of standing start – it’s not till at least halfway through the second disc that you begin to have an inkling of what’s actually happening on Chaldera, and when you do, it flips everything you think you know on its head.

The Fourth Doctor, Series 7A is both a celebration and an extension of everything Tom Baker and Louise Jameson did on screen, into a wider, more colourful, less budget-restricted audio universe – The Sons of Kaldor gives you a fresh new take on one of their most successful TV encounters; The Crowmarsh Experiment puts the emphasis on Leela in a way which would never have been allowed on 1970s TV, but which in 2018 makes the Doctor and his companions feel much more like real friends, looking out for and trusting in each other; and The Mind Runners/The Demon Rises is a sci-fi epic that would take at least New Who budgets and timescales to put on screen, and more probably Hollywood capabilities.

Between them, they’re a fantastic start to the seventh series of adventures for the Fourth Doctor, four joyous hours of audio-TV that will leave you entirely satisfied, but hungry for the release of the next set.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips 8.1 - The Authentic Experience by Tony J Fyler

Tony goes in search of the real deal.

The Authentic Experience kicks off Series 8 of the Short Trips range from Big Finish, with a Sixth Doctor and Peri tale of alternative lives and experiences, written by TV and audio Sontaran of choice, Dan Starkey.

Trickily, even to summarise what’s going on in the story will ruin the first ten minutes or so of your listening experience, because it goes in heavy on the befuddlement factor – it depends on you not knowing what’s going on to sell both its concept and its atmosphere.

What can be said is that those first ten minutes are the start of a series of experiences, showing potential lives led and embodied by everyone’s favourite Eighties botanist, Peri Brown. It’s not a story that deals in alternative Peris though, so much as it is an interesting science fiction thought experiment on ways to monetise time travel. So far, so interesting. A script written by Starkey, an opportunity for Nicole Bryant to stretch herself in audio beyond her usual Peri performance (and an opportunity which it must be said she grasps with both hands, doing hard work with her duties as narrator, Peri and all the other characters in this story), and a Short Trip directed by regular Big Finish legend, Lisa Bowerman. Where’s the bad?

Sadly, the story feels like rather less than the sum of its parts. The Authentic Experience is not by any means a bad story. It’s more that it quickly becomes a guessable one, with science fiction concepts a touch too familiar from other sources blended together in a way that allows the imagination of listeners to spool ahead to the end faster than the run-time does, creating an artificial sense that the story is slow and padded, a handful of scenarios stitched together for the sake of showing Peri in different lives and outfits and moods between Point A and Point B.

The central plot-device is a time-honoured one, having more than a little in common with Carnival of Monsters, and there are plots throughout the history of Doctor Who based on machines going wrong or machines simply doing things the Doctor considers monstrous, and him battling to shut them down. The machine which allows Peri to experience the varieties of weirdness which make up the majority of the story, to be fair to Dan Starkey, is an interesting take on those plots. That said, there are elements studded throughout the storyline which make insufficient sense, the most nitty-gritty of which is that the people who sign up for the ‘Authentic Experience’ can enter that experience individually, but the Doctor determines they can only be brought out of it en masse, and through the actions of Peri. The reason for that never feels sufficiently explained, which adds to that sensation of things happening the way they do simply so this particular story can be told, rather than because of any consistent logic in the plot.

Bryant works gamely to create an immersion in the atmosphere of several different environments in the story, and she gives a performance that certainly carries the listener through to the end. She’s helped along by Bowerman’s direction and the sound design, but at the end of it all, you’re left with the sensation that you’ve heard the story of an irritating Sunday afternoon in the Doctor and Peri’s time-travelling life, rather than a story that demanded to be told.

That said, that’s almost the remit of the Short Trips series – to give us additional slices of life on board the Tardis, shorter stories that show us the Doctor and his friends dealing with the adventures where alien Armageddon isn’t necessarily the order of the day. The Authentic Experience certainly delivers on that level – its flaw is that by allowing listeners to guess its twists ahead of time, it ends up feeling like a Short Trip that’s nevertheless rather longer than it needs to be.

Big Finish Reviews+ Kingdom of Lies by Tony J Fyler

‘Up the Republic!’ says Tony.

Kingdom of Lies is a comedy of royalty and vanity, with occasional assassins, very occasional mishaps and more than a handful of references to British royal shenanigans over the last few decades.

A duke and a duchess, not long married and realising they hate each other, have divided the city of Cardenas right down the middle, with a blue zone and a red zone, and an enormously precise line that must not ever ever ever be crossed on pain of dungeon-wallowing and possibly death. They conduct a PR war to each appear the more wounded, the more compassionate, in order to win the love of the people, as a way of sticking it to each other, and potentially manoeuvring to a position of practical power over each other, the duke determined to keep his duchess’ dowry, the duchess intending to one day become the sole ruler of the duchy. They’re both, when it comes down to it, the kind of people you’d stab yourself in the leg with forks rather than spend any real time with.

And then the Fifth Doctor’s full Tardisload arrive, and are easily divided by virtue of where they happen to be standing, half the team going to the duke’s dungeons, the other half to the duchess’.

It’s a story premise you’d expect from the Graham Williams/Douglas Adams era of Who, which rather proves how dedicated a performer Tom Baker actually was in selling their premises, because it doesn’t quite work with Peter Davison’s gang. There’s a degree of solid comedy from this particular Doctor being mistaken for an elusive assassin, and Sarah Sutton gives it her best pantomime effort as Nyssa, his deadly assistant – ‘He murders for money, I kill because I like it!’ – but a little too much of the story’s wiring is left on show for it to be truly immersive: the Doctor and Nyssa are ‘assassins’ brought in to kill the duchess, while Tegan and Adric are security consultants who can help the duchess defeat the assassins hired by her husband, and round and round and round we go, powered mostly by satire and the need to Do Stuff.

It’s not by any means a bad story, Kingdom of Lies – it’ll keep you entertained for a couple of hours, and if you like enclosed stories with stakes that are both high and a tiiiiny bit Moffatty (in that nobody who seems to be dead should necessarily be presumed dead, ever. Or, in fact, presumed to be what they seem), you’ll have enough fun with Kingdom of Lies to listen to it again a little while. If you happen to give a fig about, for instance, the heartache of the Charles and Diana years of British history, you might well find Something About Which You Can Be Offended, because writers Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky take a ruthlessly ‘plague on both your houses’ approach to skewering royal vanity, with allusions which feel obvious enough to punch, but as long as you don’t give the aforementioned fig, there’s fun to be had with, for instance, the duchess demanding her transport be crashed, so she can stumble bloodied from the wreckage into the glare of sympathetic publicity, and blame the pilot.

In a dislocation from any sense of reality, things get rather more fun again when the in-laws turn up – with the duchess’ dad (played with good bluster and imaginary bushy moustache by Tim Bentinck) declaring war on the duchy, and then nipping off to put a bet on the result. Richenda Carey, as Duchess Miranda’s mother, is a bonus to the production, adding energy and a sense of matriarchal power to proceedings. It’s fair to say though that things start to flag by the time the assassin the Doctor’s been pretending to be arrives in person, and it’s less than helpful that they’re played by Patsy Kensit, who fits neatly in a long line of actresses who turn in stolid performances and say the lines they’re given, despite clearly having very little idea what they’re doing – Beryl Reid and Joan Sims, we salute you.

Overall, Kingdom of Lies is a fluffy bit of royal fun that does very little harm and entertains for its running time. Will it change your life or push you to new depths of appreciation for what Doctor Who on audio can do? No, but then it’s not really trying to do that. It’s entertaining and fun and when it tries to make a deeper point about people who attach themselves to people in power to advance their own position by stoking conflict, it largely succeeds – no mean feat, because that’s a message that could easily have been lost in the spinning together of strands as the story comes to its conclusion.

Spend a vacation in the Kingdom of Lies – you’ll have a laugh, and then get on with your day.

Big Finish Reviews+ The First Doctor Adventures, Volume 1 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s in an Unbound Dimension.

Here’s the thing.

People die.

Every day, they just keel over and stop being. As the Doctor would say, that’s fine – everything has its time, and everything dies. Even the people who, because they played a certain role, have become immortal in our imaginations. We’ll die too, one day, and they will go on being immortal in someone else’s imaginations, because – well, because that’s what immortality means.

In the world of audio drama though, you can be reborn as somebody else, and then, to some extent they’ll be immortal too, for playing you, playing someone that people have taken to their hearts. If you want to keep up your immortality, sooner or later that has to be true, and that has to be OK.

Big Finish has, for instance, recast Jon Pertwee as Tim Treloar, and now the Third Doctor, immortal as he is because of Pertwee, is having new ideas through the body and the voice of Treloar. And that’s fine. The company also frequently uses Frazer ‘Holy gods, that’s uncanny’ Hines to play the Second Doctor, rather than the annoyingly extinct Patrick Troughton, who made him famous. Elliot Chapman now plays Michael Craze playing Ben Jackson, and both William Russell and Peter Purves have got their different versions of William Hartnell’s First Doctor down beautifully.

And that’s fine too.

I mention all this by way of prelude to telling you I had no enthusiasm for this box set. None at all.

David Bradley’s a fantastic actor, and playing William Hartnell in An Adventure In Time And Space, I thought he was entirely peerless. I wasn’t, however, in favour of his being written into the actual TV Doctor Who as the First Doctor, because, to my mind he neither looked nor sounded like the character when dressed in the get-up. Time however had passed between An Adventure and Twice Upon A Time, and Bradley did enormously good work on screen, winning me over to his interpretation of the First Doctor (despite the occasionally heavy-handed writing which made the First Doctor out to be more blatantly sexist than he ever was on screen).

And I still had absolutely no enthusiasm for this box set, because while the other members of this Tardis crew (Jamie Glover as Ian, Jemma Powell as Barbara, and Claudia Grant as Susan) are all fine actors in their own right, their roles in An Adventure had been minimal, and they felt cast more as lookalikes than especially as sound-alikes. So bringing them across to audio felt like a visual cash-in without, necessarily, the vocal skills to support it.

So – does it work? Could a box set like this convert me?

Well, mostly yes…and a little no.

There are two four-part adventures in the first volume of The First Doctor Adventures – The Destination Wars, which takes the crew to an alien world, and The Great White Hurricane, which is a pure historical that drops our heroes into 19^th century New York and entangles them in the lives of the local gangs in the shadow of a great big meteorological time bomb – a superstorm blizzard that is due to hit the whole east coast.

The first thing to say is that the writing is superb in both stories – Matt Fitton poses a great philosophical question about whether the ends justify the means in The Destination Wars, and Guy Adams gives us a pulse-pounder that works like a much better version of The Day After Tomorrow in The Great White Hurricane. As might be expected of these experienced hands, there’s barely a note wrong in either of the stories, either in terms of delivering adventures with solid hooks, engaging characters and proper dilemmas, or of evoking the period of the first two years of Doctor Who on screen.

In Fitton’s story particularly, the excitement is especially pulled along by the inclusion of what is now the earliest audio version of the Master, played by James Dreyfus. Yes, really, James Dreyfus, known to generations of Britcom-watchers as Constable Goody in The Thin Blue Line, or as Tom Farrell in Gimme Gimme Gimme. Known, possibly, to most Americans as the camp workmate of Hugh Grant in Notting Hill. That James Dreyfus…is the Master.

Nails it.

Totally, utterly, without a moment’s hesitation, nails it. Sounds like nothing for which he’s best known, but channels the darkness efficiently into a slightly pre-Delgado version still very much on the side of dark sanity, rather than the increasingly demented versions of Alex Macqueen or Michelle Gomez. James Dreyfus: you’ll believe a voice can sound elegantly malignant.

The dilemma of The Destination Wars taps into the sad historical reality that war is an accelerator pedal for technological advancement, and brings the Tardis crew into the lives of a family on a far-distant planet, as time passes and war is brought, intentionally, to them. There’s a neat touch of proto-Salamander underpinning the story, the Master as Enemy of An Entirely Different World, playing both sides against the middle to boost their advancement for his own unspeakable ends. Bradley and Dreyfus become a solidly antagonistic pair, more bluntly adversarial than Pertwee and Delgado, Davison and Ainley, Tennant and Simm or Capaldi and Gomez, and the dynamic of soured, embittered friendship helps power the drama along.

The Great White Hurricane fulfils its destiny as a pure historical by making the weather the big bad, and separating our heroes early. Much of the story is a quest by each of them to find the others and get back to the Tardis, which rings true to the period. The adventures they have along the way, including internecine teen gang wars, a mother in search of her stolen child, a frozen train full of stranded passengers and a frozen river leading to some Titanic action and an all-hands-on-deck effort to save lives are rich in characterization, meaning we enjoy the time we spend in New York, while still feeling the imperative pull of the weather that’s about to hit.

So – all good then?

Almost.

Bradley gets quite quickly into the swing of the audio adventures, and you begin believing that he’s just giving ‘another interpretation’ of the First Doctor you know and love. The rest of the Tardis crew though deliver their characters with varying degrees of success. Suffice it to say that in one case, the disparity between the performance of the original on screen and the performance here in audio goes beyond distracting and hits levels that disconnect the listener entirely from the character being played. It rather detracts from the drama when characters are put in peril if, whenever you hear them, you’re made to think ‘Who’s that again? No, really?’, and that’s what happens on this box set, though it’s more noticeable in The Great White Hurricane because in The Destination Wars, the Bradley-Dreyfus double act and the philosophical meat of the story does much to distract from that feeling of disconnection.

The stories are still compelling, and Bradley leads a bold effort to reimagine the First Doctor and his friends for the 21^st century, allowing them to have new adventures. I would like to have been entirely wrong about the ‘lookalike, not sound-alike’ thing, and in forthcoming volumes, they may well square the circle and bring the one particularly distracting performance at least within a distance where with a hearty jump, the imagination of the listener can convince itself the character at least is the same, even if the person playing them is entirely different. In Volume 1, though, I’m only mostly wrong.

Mostly wrong is absolutely good enough to give this box set a whirl, incidentally. You can safely spend your money on the basis of my being mostly wrong.

But here’s to a future in which I’m increasingly, decidedly and thoroughly wrong.

Articles Welcome to Issue 55 - WATNOW: Greeks Bearing Gifts

Articles

WATNOW Greeks Bearing Gifts

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/articles-where-are-they-now-greeks.html

Big Finish Reviews+

The First Doctor Adventures Vol 1

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/big-finish-reviews-first-doctor.html

The Fourth Doctor Adventures

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/big-finish-reviews-fourth-doctor.html

River Song Vol 3

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/big-finish-reviews-diary-of-river-song.html

Short Trips 8.1. The Authentic Experience

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/big-finish-reviews-short-trips-81.html

Kingdom of Lies

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/big-finish-reviews-kingdom-of-lies-by.html

Fans Fiction

Mitchell – Patience part 2

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/fans-fiction-mitchell-patience-part-2.html

Who Reviews

The King’s Dragon

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/who-reviews-kings-dragon-by-dj-forrest.html

The Glamour Chase

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/who-reviews-glamour-chase-by-dj-forrest.html

Death Riders

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/who-reviews-death-riders-by-dj-forrest.html

Attack of the Cybermen

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/who-reviews-attack-of-cybermen-by-tony.html

The Whoniverse Round-Up

February 2018

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-whoniverse-round-up-february-2018.html

Nathan Sussex

Daniele Favilli

Editor’s Note

It’s been a busy old month, as per usual, and there’s been some exciting news across social media, if you’re a fan of a certain soap opera you might have seen a familiar face of Welsh tv, and of course, if you’re a fan of a certain Italian actor, who celebrated his first directorial debut in Florence on Thursday 1^st February, you’d have plenty to talk about. Visit our Whoniverse Page for those exciting nuggets of news.

Mitchell’s story is ramping up the pace in part 2 of Patience, which sees Jack looking none too well, and Clark becoming extremely worried about his Uncle, and Mitchell, well, playing Solitaire, but why are his hearts flashing on the screen? Find out more on the Fans Fiction Page.

We have Reviews galore on our Who and Big Finish pages, be sure to look in on them.

Over the next few months, I’ll be doing a fair bit of maintenance on the website, but for most of it, I’ll keep the site open. I am hoping to have it all updated before May, when, can you believe it – Project: Torchwood will be 5 years old?

(ha, more like January 2019 – lot further than May)

We’ve covered so much ground in those five years, and so there’s a fair bit I need to do, in order to repost memories over the coming year. Lots of things happened, reviews, interviews, News, stories and Expo & Cons experiences, and I’m hoping to visit one or two myself this year, with or without the Weevil.

So, enjoy Issue 55 – Greeks Bearing Gifts, and do please leave your comments below as we’d love to know what you think of our website, and what you’d like to see added.

Also this month, we’ve changed our Contents guide, in order for you to access the links there, rather than having to access tons of links over social media. This makes it easier for not just you, but also us. In the early days, we discovered we lost a couple of people during the posting of links purely because of the bombardment. So, to save us and you, this will be the new way forward from now on.

Because we celebrate 5 years this year, we’ll be posting up the Content and cover of every Issue thus far, over a period of a few months, so you can relive the enjoyable articles, interviews and reviews, and remember those of you who frequented Conventions with tales to tell of panels galore.

So without further ado,

Croeso i Issue 55, WATNOW Greeks Bearing Gifts

~Djak~

Articles Where Are They Now? Greeks Bearing Gifts Cast

A young British soldier who regards women of the night, as creatures to hit, finds more than he bargained for when he chases Mary, a young wench, through the woods in the dead of night. Finding her again in a clearing, he raises his weapon, and shoots her. Shock apparent when she doesn’t fall down dead, but move with enormous speed towards him, plunging her hand deep into his chest to remove his heart, she admires how ripe it is, as the soldier falls dead at her feet.

Many, many years later, the body is discovered on a building site, beside a large metal ‘stapler’, which is later discovered to be a transporter device, held by two people. When Mary finds a way of entering Torchwood Hub, Jack is ready for her, and sets the device to ‘enable’ sending her away off planet, to the centre of the sun!

Danielle Denby-Ashe

‘Mary’

‘When I first got here, I found it almost obscene. My world was savage. Enforced worship in temples the size of cities, execution squads roaming the streets. Dissent of any kind meant death, or transportation to what they'd call a feral outpost.’

Mary possesses the ability to read minds using a pendant. She’s an alien who can morph into a beautiful floaty translucent being. She was a prisoner being transported when she found herself on Earth. Escaping after killing her guard, Mary found an English wench and used her body as host, but her body needed sustenance throughout the generations, and slowly, Owen Harper began to realise just why there was a gaping hole in hearts of patients through the ages.

Many people who love UK comedies might remember their first introduction of Danielle, from her character in My Family which was broadcast between 2000 – 2011. She played Janey Harper for 94 episodes. Her character wasn’t the smartest tool in the box but she was a likeable person. After Torchwood, you might remember her as Lorraine Donnegan in Waterloo Road, from 2009 – 2013, where I think her character was keen to change the shape of the school. In 2016 Danielle played Julia Lubas in Silent Witness and currently (2017/2018) is playing Gertrude for the film Heidi: Queen of the Mountain, which is still (Jan 2018) filming.

Tom Robertson

‘Soldier’

‘Do whores have prayers?’

The British soldier who naivily thought he could slap a woman around till she gave him what he wanted, bit off more than he could chew when he tested Mary's patience. Of course, when he aimed his gun and fired at the English wench in a Welsh strip of forest, she was no longer the woman who had previously scraped her nails down his face.

Since Greeks Bearing Gifts episode, Tom has a limited credit list for television, appearing as PC Turner in the BBC daytime medical drama Doctors in 2008 episode The Visit, and as a Designer for the TV Series Switch episode Designer in 2012.

Ravin J Ganatra

‘Neil’

'I was thinking of the Isle of Wight. Do you remember? We had that chalet around when Danny was walking, and the chalet was just full of spiders and you called me your hero because I wasn't scared. I'd just pick them up and throw them out... It was this perfect little memory. We were happy because we were together. And all this nonsense with Lawrence, it's fine. I forgive you, because I'm looking at the bigger picture now.'

Neil was only discovered planning his family's demise when Toshiko wore the pendant, given to her by Mary. Following him to his house, she whacked him over the head with a golf club in the hallway before he was able to fire off his shotgun. Not sure if she actually killed him, but I'm sure she gave him one hell of a bad headache.

Since playing Neil, Ravin has played many different characters, from medical practitioners, to Police Inspectors to shop keepers and more, with appearances in Coronation Street, Hollyoaks and The Bill, between 2007 and 2015. Ravin played Dr Dutta in the film The Boy with the Topknot in 2017 which was on BBC2 and should still be available to watch on iPlayer. In the television series Sept nains et moi, in 2018 he played Mr Kahn for 9 episodes.

As well as television, Ravin has also voiced the character Mahajan for Torchwood radio play Golden Age.

  

Eiry Thomas

‘Carol (Neil's ex wife)’

'I want him back at six. And I mean six this time. Kelly's given me ninety minutes after hours at the tanning salon as a wedding present. Besides, you're breaking the law bringing him home late. My dad reckons I could have you arrested, so think on.'

With her mind fixed only on her up and coming wedding, Carol thinks nothing of venting her frustration at her ex husband Neil, when he comes over to collect Danny, for his regular sleep over. Comes as one hell of a shock when she's staring down the barrel of a shotgun.

Since Torchwood in 2006, Eiry has appeared in 4 episodes of Belonging, 2 episodes of Eastenders, 6 episodes of Pen Talar, played Nia Morgan in the first episode of Hinterland - Devil's Bridge, which also starred Sara Gregory (find last name). Played Mrs Williams for five episodes of The Indian Doctor in 2013, Lisa Howell in Stella for three episodes, played Catrin in Byw Celwydd for 16 episodes from 2016 - 2017 and I think we all remember her character in Keeping Faith/Un Bore Mercher as DI Williams.

I remember her one episode in Hinterland perhaps more than I remember her being in Torchwood.

Shaheen Jafargholi

‘Danny’

'I don't wanna go. It's boring.'

Danny may have thought that staying with his Dad would be boring, but perhaps he wouldn't be thinking that after the day his Dad figured, shooting his family was like 'going to sleep'.

Since Greeks Bearing Gifts, Shaheen has played two major characters for two popular television programmes - Troy for 5 episodes of Grandpa in my Pocket, a CITV programme in 2009, and Shakil Kazemi for 146 episodes of Eastenders from 2016 - 2018. As well as an appearance on the 2016 Children in Need programme as his Eastenders character.

Alexander Hathaway

‘Mr Bond’

'Ah, Mister Bond, I've been expecting you. You are expected to die.'

Toshiko puts on the pendant in the Shopping precinct and picks up on thoughts by many people as they pass by her. The James Bond fan brought a smile to her face, just before she picked up the dark thoughts from Neil.

Alexander was also in the episode Combat, as a fight club punter but again uncredited. (must look out his character). Although many of his roles have been uncredited, they've been involved in some really awesome films, including his credited roles. From Persuasion, to The Dark Knight, to Quantum of Solace to Kick Ass. In The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation, as well as television series Casualty for which he was credited as James Robinson, uncredited for 2 other roles previous. Plays Donny for Sunny Side Up which is in pre-production stage, and out in 2018.

Hugh Holman

‘Telepathy Victim’

‘Silence when the door opens. Can't do another night of the silence.’

As Toshiko heard the various voices talking in her head, thanks to the pendant, a young, curly haired young man in a long brown coat, strode along the boardwalk beside her, and on into the distance, his voice-over mentioning abuse. The voice of the victim was not actually Hugh speaking.

Since Greeks Bearing Gifts, Hugh has played a Footman, a Nazi Officer, a Student, a Cameraman, one of Camelot's Guards in Merlin. A Fairground Visitor, a Policeman, a Nobleman, a Diner in Sherlock episode The Empty Hearse. Was a Traveller on Walking on Sunshine. Was a Travelling Man in Everest. Was a Spact Zombie in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - gory but fun film. Played a customer in Mr Selfridge series in 2016, and plays a Military Attaché for Entebbe in 2018. Only a few of these roles are credited.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Diary of River Song, Series 3

River Song.

Possibly the character most ‘like’ a female version of the New Who Doctors before there was a female version of the New Who Doctors, she was a character born in complexity: the child of two Tardis companions, imbued with the regenerative properties of Time Lords, but stolen from her parents at an early age, and trained to be a Doctor-killing psychopath, who eventually fell in love with her prey, gave up her remaining regenerations to cure him, and went on to marry him, serve time for his murder and eventually die to save his life in the Library. River Song was the ultimate Steven Moffat instance of having your cake and eating it too – she was everything, killer of the Doctor, wife of the Doctor, time-travelling psychopath redeemed by love and ultimate hardcore fangirl.

Series 3 of the Diary of River Song from Big Finish deals more directly than ever before with the part of her psychology that is frequently ignored since her redemption - her relationship with the woman who stole her away from her parents, Madam Kovarian, and how her existence and her use for the fulfilment of a psychotic goal impacted the universe.

As draws for an audio series of River Song stories go, that’s pretty high up there, giving River more in-depth character context than she’s often allowed.

In The Lady In The Lake, Nev Fountain poses the question of why, if you were Madam Kovarian, you’d settle for one proto-Time Lord assassin when you could have a whole stable full, and what such socially-dislocated proto-Time Lords might think about their ability to apparently cheat death.

In a story that’s death-heavy but manages to punch at a solid comedy weight into the bargain, Fountain pulls the threads of his central story tight in both the first and final reels, delivering a body-blow of emotion that deepens the reality of the world of River and Kovarian far beyond anything that appeared on TV, while showing how important River’s redemption was, by the sharp contrast of showing us what life is like for those who are like her, but who never found their way past the psychopathic religious zealotry of their wicked foster mother.

A Requiem For The Doctor, by Jac Rayner, is more of a traditional Doctor Who story, with a few River bends along the way. River joins up with the Fifth Doctor and his companion Brook to investigate whether Mozart finished his Requiem, and whether in fact he died of natural causes or was poisoned. The story quickly moves on to uncover a market in special poisons that help battered or abused wives to deal with their repugnant husbands, and there’s at first a seeming murder mystery which evolves into something rather deeper and more meaningful.

There’s no real disguising the fact that Peter Davison’s Doctor and River Song feel like an odd pairing, with nothing like the chemistry of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor and River in the second box set. As he himself says in Rayner’s episode, ‘River doesn’t need me. And I quite like to be needed.’ He’s the young Doctor with the grandfatherly soul, more comfortable acting as a guide to the universe for younger ingénues (like Nyssa, Peri and Brook), than he is dealing with the ballsier type of women who occasionally plague him (like Tegan and River). It’s an awkwardness that is thrown into sharp relief in My Dinner With Andrew by John Dorney, as Davison plays a number of roles in what is essentially The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, only with more attempted assassination. It’s a comedy romp with a funny French waiter, numerous versions of several people all in the same place at the same time, only hiding in different rooms, and for most of its length it plays distinctly as trans-temporal farce, only occasionally slipping into pathos as innocents are drawn increasingly into the dance of Kovarian and River over whether the Doctor lives or dies.

Oh and as an extra-special bonus for Hitch-Hiker’s fans, it has Peter Davison eschewing meat and ordering a green salad. It’s the little touches that matter.

The lightest episode in terms of tone, it’s by no means a straightforward one, and the phrase ‘timey-wimey’ might have been invented to describe it, but in terms of episodes to re-listen to, My Dinner With Andrew is probably your go-to on this box set because of the speed at which the farce is played.

Matt Fitton’s capstone to the set, The Furies, is a curious story that brings River home to her younger self’s bedroom, complete with disembowelled teddies and throwing stars. It shows an aspect of her character frequently forgotten or thrown away – the training she received as a child in the art and mentality of psychotic killing, so she’d be able to destroy the Doctor at any opportune moment. The chance to meet up with the ‘next generation’ of River-alikes, including H1, H2 and O (yes, really) shows us the different ways in which elements of her essential personality, before it was broadened by experience of the Doctor and his universe, were foregrounded. It also shows us Frances Barber’s Kovarian in fuller flight than at any point in the box set so far, as she experiences not only the likelihood of destruction by the main branch of her own church, but rebellion in her ranks, the possibility of a poltergeist and the personal hell that is bad dreams. There’s lots to enjoy in The Furies – including the apparent breakdown of Kovarian’s always edgy personality, taut as it is on the very edge of religious terror every second of the day. That taut determination is tipped over into madness in The Furies and it feels like the right complement to everything we know about River and Kovarian from their on-screen adventures.

Series 3 of The Diary of River Song is a slick production that sees Alex Kingston increasingly at home in the audio medium, and takes River back if not all the way to her roots, then to the place where her early psychology was formed. It gives her origin an expanded reality that you only realise it needed once you’ve heard it. More than either of the previous box sets, it feels like part of the TV chronology of her story, just a part we never got to see on screen. That makes it a set you’re going to need to listen to if you’re any kind of River fan, because you currently don’t know all of the story.