Reviews Torchwood: Gooseberry by Tony J Fyler

 

When Owen Harper (Burn Gorman), Torchwood’s medic, sometimes walking dead and King of the Weevils, and Andy Davidson (Tom Price), the organisation’s on-again off-again traditional police liaison, star together in an audio drama from Big finish, 90% of the time, some really dark and creepy stuff invades the next hour of your life. 

They’ve been caught up in domestic prison/torture horror in Corpse Day, searched mountains for victims of a grisly child killer in The Hope, and…erm…chased the ineffable monkey of good luck around Cardiff. 

OK, 66% of the time, some really dark and creepy stuff invades the next hour of your life. 33% it’s just weird. Fun, and still with dark moments, but weird. 

So which side of the dark and creepy/mostly just weird divide does their fourth pairing, Gooseberry, fall on? 

Well, it’s fairly dark in that it develops into a study of addiction or obsession that leads both to tragic consequences and to a deeply human disregard for those consequences on the part of the obsessive. But it would be a mistake to say it’s dark…by their standards when they get together. It’s certainly more than half-past light and frothy, but by their standards it’s about quarter-to dark. That feels like a deliberate decision by writer James Goss – there would be ways to go much darker with the story of this premise than he goes here, but you’d run the risk of straying into audience-depressing territory if you went much further than Gooseberry goes. 

The premise of the story? 

Andy Davidson has a girlfriend. 

Exactly – it’s not what you’d call earth-shattering, as a premise, is it? 

There’s so much to it than that, and James Goss draws you in to the complications that arise from Andy Davidson having a girlfriend before the credits even roll, with a single, economical line from Owen. The thing about which is, if we’re keeping you all pristine and spoiler-free, we can’t tell you what it is. 

To know would really blow the impact of that moment, and that moment’s worth preserving because its consequences collapse in on you while the theme plays, and the drama expands in your head as you begin to understand the ramifications you’re about to hear played out.

Andy’s girlfriend, Caite, is played with a fabulous joie de vivre by Lois Chimimba. And Caite has a secret. A secret Andy has yet to notice, despite convincing himself he’s in love. And a secret which Owen clocks within seconds of meeting her. 

That inevitably draws the two of them into an immediate, intimate-but-different relationship. It’s not a relationship of traditional lust, but there are elements in their dynamic that make it feel interestingly transgressive. It’s more than ‘my friend fancies my girlfriend.’ In fact, it’s much more visceral and primal than that, because Caite’s secret is something that can make Owen – dead man walking Owen – feel alive again. 

Imagine that for a moment. You’re dead, but you’re still here, in your body. Your senses don’t work. You can’t smell coffee or enthusiasm, bacon or raindrops, you can’t taste love or chips or regret or tears. 

And then you meet someone who can give that back to you. 

What would you not do for them? For more of that feeling? 

That’s the actual premise of Gooseberry – Owen gets a chance to feel alive again. But to a dead man, life is more addictive than it ever was when he had it the first time round.

In some ways, there’s a positive message to be taken from that premise – enjoy everything you have, because you have so much more than you’re conditioned to knowing. But in the tack we take in Gooseberry, Owen begins to exist for those moments when, with Caite’s help, he can peek back through from where he is, and feel life in all its rancid, wonderful complexity. 

It’s not traditional lust – it’s a lust for life. And it’s only fair to say that Louis Chimimba plays it straight – the lust is very much one-sided, Caite sharing her gift with Owen more and more only because he wants and needs it. Her love for Andy feels real the whole way through, and she never displays what in TV Torchwood you’d almost expect – some sign of being out for a bigger prize, some verbal tick which on re-listening you’d point to and go “Ahh, you see?”

It's also worth acknowledging the levels on which the story works. Sure, it works on its surface level, as Owen increasingly demanding something he feels he needs, and Caite’s consent to it starting off eager to share with him but becoming increasingly resentful of his demands over time. 

Especially because there are consequences to her gift. Consequences which aren’t immediately clear as the two explore what it can give to Owen, but which increasingly, Caite warns him of, and Owen stops caring about. Even when the consequences come home to roost, Owen wants to carry on, wants to use his Torchwood privileges to make sure Andy doesn’t find out about what the Gooseberry has been getting upto with his girlfriend.

This is the interesting duality at the heart of the story. You can listen to it on its surface level, and of course, Owen’s journey into moments of ecstasy that make life worth living and damn the consequences also works as a drug addiction parallel. 

But more than that, it works as an actual, traditional-lust affair story – especially because as time goes on and Owen throws more and more caution to the wind, he goes to more extreme lengths to make sure Andy doesn’t find out – destroying lives, memories and on some level his rational morality (such as it is) in the process. 

Andy, he reasons, may love Caite – or at least, what he knows about Caite. But Owen needs her. Physically, mentally, even almost spiritually, which for a man who knows the darkness is all there is beyond his life is really saying something. 

It’s a journey into the sacrifice of every principle, every standard, in the search for moments of light against the darkness, and Burn Gorman was absolutely born to play Owen in this story, his gift for characters on the edge of concepts like good and evil really bolstering the boldness of the writing here. 

Tom Price, meanwhile, is able to show what has at some other points been told – Andy Davidson is no fool. Dogging the steps of the not-couple as they go beyond the reach of principle, he’s a kind of implacable avatar of destiny here. 

For all Owen says he respects Andy enough to lie to him about what’s really happening, it’s an insult from Owen to automatically assume that he can outwit ‘Plod,’ as he calls him, especially as his removal of evidence is so typically…Torchwood. Subtle as a sledgehammer in the face, and self-congratulatory to boot, Owen reckons without the grounded, dogged determination and the copper’s instincts of Andy Davidson. 

That leads to what on screen would have been a classic and impressive visual effects finale. Here on audio – and surprisingly, for Big Finish – the ending feels a little underpowered, the resolution of the fundamental threat feeling a little pushed for time, and lower in Owen angst than befits the ultimate dilemma it offers him: continued feelings of being alive versus…erm…well, versus badness (Spoiler-free, remember?). 

What feels certain at the end though is that the relationship between one of Torchwood’s best Odd Couples will be – or should be – significantly changed in future audio adventures. Andy has given Owen so many chances to do the right thing, and been perpetually disappointed, not so much in terms of the Gooseberry factor of running around with a friend’s girlfriend, but more in terms of doing the typical Torchwood thing, and not crediting him with the intelligence to see beyond it. Whether they can be the almost-sort-of-friends they’ve been before must surely be in question from here on out. 

Pick up Gooseberry for a cracking, fast-paced relationship drama with two of Torchwood’s finest. With the perfectly-pitched help of Louis Chimimba, Gooseberry gets to the fundamental truth of Owen and Andy’s friendship, and leaves it in a very different state to how it finds it. It’s a high-octane ride into life, death, love, need and lies, with a light touch and a Torchwood twist. 

Reviews Torchwood: Coffee by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s brewing up.

 

There’s a phenomenon. We call it hindsight. 

That phenomenon where we look back on the way things played out, and it all seems inevitable. If we remember people who are dead and gone from our perspective, we tend to view their lives, or our interactions with their lives, as being tinged with a sadness of inevitable death. 

That’s a thing we bring from our perspective in the here and now because they’re not here or now right with us. It’s likely that their lives didn’t have that sense of impending ending while they and we were living them together. But afterwards, it’s hindsight that shows us how little time we were ‘destined’ to have together. 

Usually, hindsight is a bittersweet gift of the old, because they have longer to look back on.

In the age of Covid, sadly and appallingly, you don’t need to be that old to regret the lives no longer lived among us. 

Wow – heavy opening, right? Yes, but it feels appropriate for this particular story of Ianto Jones, by James Goss. The sense of knowing the ending ahead of time is threaded all the way through Coffee, which is told as a kind of flip-side to Ianto’s life with Torchwood 3, from his early attempts to get in, to his encounters with Cardiff’s pterodactyl, through the revelation of Lisa in Cyberwoman, to the various apocalypses (apocalypti?) of the on-screen show and his growing relationship with Jack, all the way to the 456 and slightly beyond it.

It’s a snapshot of the Ianto that was always implied on-screen, but never shown because there was always something madder going on in Torchwood. Ianto in between the ends of the world. 

Ianto… and a coffee shop named Baps. 

Baps when we first encounter it is Cardiff Bay’s only real café. Originally run by the mother of the owner David (Shaun Chambers), it’s been in David’s hands since his mother…disappeared. Kathy (Sarah Griffin) is a well-meaning backpacker from Indiana, who fell for a guy in Cardiff while raising money for the next stage of her adventures, and who has found herself not leaving, but working at Baps, worrying and laughing with David when Ianto Jones first walks through their door. 

The tale that unfolds is a kind of bas relief, a story of life in Cardiff as it’s affected by the existence and the actions of Torchwood, a story of the ‘ordinary people’ Torchwood exists to serve, and how the sledgehammer methods the organisation sometimes employs leave imprints on the world around them. 

When Ianto arrives, he’s relatively fresh from Torchwood 1 and the cataclysm of Canary Wharf. And having found Baps as an old-fashioned greasy spoon café, he teaches David and Kathy the meaning of really good, “posh” coffee, rather than the instant-with-a-glug-of-milk they’ve been serving since David’s mother’s time. 

It’s a providential lesson, because Cardiff Bay is about to change – the yuppies are coming, and Baps, preceding all the Starbucks and Costas and more artisan independents, is able to rake it in when they come by following Ianto’s Canary Wharf coffee voodoo. 

The drama only rarely intertwines Ianto’s Torchwood work with the life of Baps directly, but in a sense, the cafe gives Ianto a little of the grounding that Rhys gives Gwen’s Torchwood life. There are, sprinkled along the way like coffee beans of fan-joy, references that fans will love, laugh at, punch the air over, or go “Ohhhh” about – not least the answer to an early but enduring Ianto mystery. 

And there are hints of the potential importance of Baps and its people to Ianto too. While his relationship with David is often spiky, Ianto and Kathy are friendly from the beginning. Kathy even drops hints that she might be interested in seeing more of Ianto outside the café, but at the time, he has a relationship for which “It’s complicated” baaaarely scratches the surface of adequate description. Although it is easier to fit on a profile than “My girlfriend’s a half-upgraded Cyberman in deep freeze till someone can turn her human again. Plus I need to walk the pterodactyl.” 

Nevertheless as time goes on, the impact Torchwood makes on David and Kathy is interesting and questionable. Yes, sure, saving the world, protecting humanity. But humanity in the abstract is a whole other thing to people in the particular, and that’s a difference underlined here. To be fair, it’s a difference that’s underlined in Torchwood generally and Ianto’s eventual fate specifically, but once you’ve listened to Coffee, it’s a difference that makes a more balanced sense of that fate. 

That’s a big statement, but it’s one to which James Goss’ script and the performances in this tight three-hander rise with both aplomb and vigour. David and Kathy have initially differing views on a lot of things represented by Ianto, the sharp-suited wannabe with the coffee voodoo. 

Those opinions and how they change in light of various Torchwood-related catastrophes across the running time of Coffee make for a kind of snapshot-reel of the Cardiff rarely shown on-screen. The Cardiff that pays a price for standing too close to Torchwood.

That the price is one it never asked to pay is almost obvious. That there’s little it can do but pay it is a kind of commentary on the unwilling geographical companion of greatness.

The…the what-now? 

The people who are impacted simply by standing where they are and not being able to get out of the way. The collateral damage. 

We’re trained in Doctor Who and Torchwood to cheer the goodies, because they’re better than the baddies. But sometimes, it’s worth being reminded that the places they choose for their battles never get a say. 

As in Human Nature, when Joan Redfern asks the Doctor whether, if he had not chosen to come to her time and place, would people not have died, so in Coffee, the innocent bystanders of a space-time rift, and a less-than-delicate organisation to deal with its fallout, are given a voice that’s rarely heard in the on-screen show. 

We know that Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd) will eventually pay the ultimate price to save the world, but what Coffee makes clear is the difference between him, who chose, and even strove, to be part of that effort, and those innocent civilians who are sometimes guilty of nothing but living in a place that becomes a battlefield. 

Coffee is a beautifully written story of not-Torchwood, a story of the innocent bystanders, and a fabulous snapshot gallery of Ianto’s whole life with Torchwood 3. 

As such, while Shaun Chambers and Sarah Griffin do vital work exceptionally well in getting us to care for David and Kathy and what happens to them, the greatest performance plaudits here have to go to Gareth David-Lloyd for pitching his evolving Ianto with the right accent and nuance as he goes through his life, from Torchwood 1 refugee to Torchwood 3’s coffee butler, to valued member of the team, to front-line operative who pays the price for his involvement. 

It’s a subtle, natural performance that lends truth to the notion of Coffee taking place in snapshots over time. 

One to get and listen to? 

Sorry, was that not a given when you walked in? It’s James Goss and Gareth David-Lloyd, of course it’s one to get and listen to. But the joy is that it’s more than the sum of its parts – it’s both fan-service and realistic look at the impossible situations in which we sometimes find ourselves, and the things we can do to get through them. 

And above all, it’s a reminder that the courses of our lives are always going to look inevitable eventually, so while we have them, and while we’re in control over what we do, it’s worth living in a way that makes our eventual absence a sadness, rather than a relief. 

It’s worth taking time to feel pleasure, and connection, and friendship where we can. 

It’s worth drinking the good coffee.

Reviews Red Base by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony takes on the machine. 

Sergeant Andyyyyyyy Innnnnnn Spaaaaaaaaace. 

Really though? What are the odds that Sergeant Andy Davidson would end up on a Mars base? 

Especially, as it happens, a Mars base going seriously 2001: A Space Odyssey? 

Welcome to the mind of James Goss. You may never make it home again. 

When Andy arrives on the Starr Base – yes, really, two ‘r’s - there have already been deaths among the crew. There’s a blandly-voiced computer in charge of all the life support systems (beeecause what’s gonna be wrong with that?) And everybody still alive is doing their best shiny happy people act, so as not to upset the computer. 

If you’ve seen 2001, it adds a cuteness factor to the whole death-trap in space storyline that the computer’s called Dave. But this is not the story of a super-sleek space station going progressively wrong. It’s more Alien than Star Trek, more grubby than scrubbed, and things have been going wrong more or less since the beginning, because the Starr Base was built by budget contractors as a proof of concept. It was also meant to be the set for a reality TV show, examining the actions and lives of humans on a Mars mission. 

The show was canned after its second episode. So, the crew of the Starr Base have been almost entirely forgotten. 

And then they started dying. 

There’s a reason why Torchwood sends Andy Davidson to investigate, rather than any of the others. And to his inestimable credit, Andy gets properly stuck into the drama of the base – challenging the authority of Dave, trying desperately to save at least some of the crew, and coming smack bang up against an idea popular in science fiction: the notion that robotic systems will become a danger to human life not because they go wrong, but because they do exactly as we tell them to. 

It’s an interesting role for Andy, because it stretches him into newish territory. While he’s often been the Torchwooder who’s dragged into situations by the scruff of his neck, here he’s front and centre, highly pro-active, and the only thing between the remaining crew of the Starr Base and a grisly death. While we’ve previously heard Ianto Jones indulging his secret agent fantasies, this is Andy Davidson as Bond in Moonraker ­– turning up, taking names, trying really hard not to die, while solving the mystery behind the deaths. Whether things are as simple as they seem – computer has a nervous breakdown, kills everyone – is not certain until gratifyingly close to the end, and when you discover what’s truly going on, it hits with an unexpectedly muted note, because there’s a black-or-whiteness to the situation. Still, the fact that Andy Davidson not only works out the truth, but also follows the line of logic to a specific ‘J’accuse’ moment, rather than a vague and general solution, shows the truth of the character. He’s actually always been capable of dealing with people and situations, it’s just that in early Torchwood, and sometimes even now, the nature of situations takes him a little while to get used to. In Red Base, he comes in ready to investigate murders, and he steps up into the gravity of the situation. In that ‘J’accuse’ moment, he switches from Bond to Poirot, giving a summation that cuts through all the whirling distraction, the action, the murder, and delivering the truth behind all the mayhem. 

If there’s a weakness in the story, it’s a weakness that more or less applies to most classic crime and mystery stories, from Holmes to Christie – once the truth of who’s killed whom and why is revealed, it’s taken for granted that that’s where the story ends. When challenged, they have little option but to confess, Cluedo-style, and the game is up when Andy names the killer. Resistance to the power of Andy may be futile, as it may with Holmes, Marple, Poirot and others, but in Andy’s case there’s little to underline that futility, no trusty police inspector to enforce the law. But then of course, there is a super Sergeant standing ready. 

Torchwood: Red Base is a rip-roaring space crime story, with some fantastic laughs – you’re going to love the pre-credits sequence, it’s physically impossible not to – and within the main drama, an increasing sense of locked-down vulnerability to systems and people and personalities. The cast – from Jeremy Ang Jones as Dave, through Rakie Ayola as Emma and Kae Alexander as Mina – nail the level of grubby, budget space exploration that will probably translate into our reality in the near future. In particular, Jeremy Ang Jones delivers a creepy, bland, non-judgmental computer tone (the secret to both HAL’s shudder-making delivery on 2001 and the Robots Of Death in Doctor Who) that really intensifies the skin-prickling danger of having reasoning AI minds in charge of all the things you need to keep you alive in a hostile environment. 

But most of all, this is Tom Price’s hour. Andy Davidson has had a long journey in Torchwood, from the might-have-been alternative to Gwen Cooper at the very start, through liaison work between Torchwood and the regular police, to his recent out-and-out Torchwood work at Big Finish, checking up on an Eighth Doctor who has no idea Torchwood exists in Stranded. This is one of Price’s finest hours as Andy though. Here, he’s allowed to step out from behind the incredulity and vulnerable humanity of his traditional role and take on baddies without backup, work through a deeply dangerous problem and come out not only alive and well, but having solved the case that destroyed a handful of would-be astronauts’ lives. It’s an hour that will give you a slightly harder, more methodical Andy than you might be used to if you’ve missed his evolution in the last few years. All he needs now to achieve full-on Torchwood status is to have either some blistering, life-changingly good, or some deeply, cringe-makingly awkward sexual chemistry with Jack Harkness, and he’s good to go.   

Catch up with Sergeant Andy Davidson in Red Base – he’s a space-base mystery-solving, murder-stopping badass. Yes, really – and you’re going to love him all over again.

Reviews The Three Monkeys by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony hears no evil. 

Some character-combinations make you tingle before they’ve said a word. 

Sometimes, that’s the result of your mind anticipating how great their chemistry would be. 

Sometimes, you’ve had prior experience of how they work together and you look forward to them on that basis. 

Sergeant Andy Davidson (Tom Price) and Owen Harper (Burn Gorman) are audio Torchwood’s prime odd couple. Every time they’ve worked together, they’ve hit the script, the drama, and most particularly the comedy out of the park. 

In The Three Monkeys, from James Goss, the comedy is more to the fore than it has been in the pair’s other outings, but that lets it ripple with unsettling undertones when the genuine threat of the episode is revealed. It’s also probably worth noting that their previous episodes together have involved a suburban torture chamber and a serial child killer, so bringing the comedy more to the fore than those is a) not that big a challenge, and b) an enormous relief.

The premise of The Three Monkeys is fairly simple. 

Some guys have all the luck. 

Bastards, mostly. 

Unscrupulous, thieving, conniving bastards with no thought for the consequences of their own actions on the little people down below. 

It’s a strange Twilight Zone concept, obviously, but try to go with it. 

For the most part, unscrupulous bastards seem content to believe that their unscrupulous bastardy brings its own rewards, and the world, complicit in their gittery, seems content to let this be the case. Being ruthless, being heartless, being devoid of care for the consequences of your actions just breeds success, we say. 

But what if there were more to it than that? 

What if, like Aladdin, they had help to get their wishes fulfilled? To get the results they wanted? What if they had a shield from the consequences of their actions, something that – to borrow a phrase from TV’s Robots of Sherwood - bestowed a climate of extraordinary benevolence on everything they did? 

Somebody’s rigging the system, and Andy Davidson wants to bring them down. 

In this story, Andy’s reasons are more personal than police – some of the consequences of the actions of one particular protected bastard have landed squarely on his family. Lives ruined. Reputations destroyed; people who died as a result of the stress dumped on them by the actions of a mogul. All those consequences, swept under the carpet with a phone call, or escaped through acts of god… 

Rule 1 of Torchwood – never trust an act of god. The gods are malicious, and probably alien.

Owen, on the other hand, has been sent along as an expression of Torchwood curiosity – or ‘to help out a mate,’ if you believe that sort of thing. He goes along as Andy, bless him, tries his hand at a little housebreaking to try and find the secrets that can bring his man down for good. 

What he finds…is a monkey. 

A small, cymbal-playing toy monkey, of the sort which, for those who know the stage show or the movie, serves as an entry-point to the story of the Phantom of the Opera (the story of a man who has seemingly unlimited power and success until the tide turns against him…).

Given that the monkey is hidden at what seems like enormous expense and difficulty, it seems like an unusual prize, and an even more unusual guardian from the slings and arrows of outrageous wossname. 

The rest of the story seems on the surface to be much more character-based than plot-driven. But then…just possibly, that’s what the monkey wants you to think. 

What the monkey is, and how it works, would be a detail or two too much to give you, but along the journey of the second half of the story, there are character developments, revelations and deepenings between the two Torchwood stalwarts, and you begin to hear them more clearly than they’ve been heard, certainly in a while, possibly ever. 

Why do they work together so well? It’s the same sort of answer as why yin and yang fit together to make a circle. Why, to borrow from another geekdom, Crowley and Aziraphale work together so well in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens. They’re almost complete opposites, going in different directions, but meeting in a mid-point on their journeys and finding they fit. Owen, the man with a great future behind him, the man who loved, and was to some extent betrayed and robbed by death, is alive beyond the point of death, almost rejected by death and forced to live on, but robbed of all life’s sensual wonders. His viewpoint is compassionate but downward-focused, unsure when this unnatural life will end, but aware that only nothingness awaits. 

Andy is a man who sometimes feels the significance of his life has passed him by – the moment when Gwen was chosen for Torchwood, and he wasn’t, robbing him of a whole other life of meaning that he could have had. His focus is compassionate too, but upward-looking, determined that he’s still here, and every day he is, he can do…at least something to make life better for people. The family drama revealed early on feels like an affront to that conviction. The idea that he can be as good and as positive as he likes, and some bastards still have all the luck offends him. And, more pertinently, the real-life consequences of such people having all the fortune offends him even more. 

And so, in their differently-facing compassion and curiosity, they find themselves together. In a car, in Cardiff’s outlying regions. With a monkey. 

There are glorious comic moments here – an audio riff on a Men In Black scene where Andy’s busy burgling and trips off alarms in the distance while Owen, trapped in a car, is questioned by police is a particular joy. But More than that, there’s a thin crust of banter laid over a growing odd-couple relationship of wary friendship, which endures some plain speaking as the fate of the meddling monkey (We’re sorry, it was there, we had to use it!) hangs in the balance. More and more as the car chase between our hapless heroes and the forces of gittery and officialdom goes on, each of them is forced to face up to some of their own self-protective fantasy. The things they say they want, the things they plan or planned to do are all very well, but if they could be granted the power to do whatever they wanted…would either of their lives change very much? It’s time to find out. Hold the monkey… 

James Goss is one of those writers you can rely on to give you good fun for your money, and usually to use it as a carrier medium for deeper, meaningful points as you go from one end of his stories to another, without ever weighing you down unnecessarily. There’s some great character work here about Owen’s status as a dead man (an ongoing journey in the audio Torchwood that never got the space or time it really needed on-screen), and while it’s the lightest of their episodes together, that works well as a medium for them and us to find out more about both Owen and Andy as human beings, rather than as characters serving a plot.

Try The Three Monkeys for a compassion-fuelled romp with dreams, aspirations, a solid dose of self-realization and a monkey. You know it’s what your days have been missing.

Reviews Fortitude by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s all at sea

Torchwood – Fortitude is Torchwood with a difference, in that its one of the range’s occasional dips into the adventures of Queen Victoria herself, with no other active Torchwood operatives in play. As such, there’s a certain additional weight on Rowena Cooper’s shoulders as Victoria to push the listener through the tale, as Victoria, perhaps, is the character who knows the most about what’s actually going on – at least at first.

In fact, this is very much a Victoria-centred tale, designed more or less to show her in her older years with the concerns of one who feels the complication of her own death on the horizon. Released in the week that Doctor Who on TV was highlighting the importance of individual figures and the way in which they move the needle of the human experience (Nikola Tesla’s Night Of Terror), it’s a poignant counterpoint to the TV version’s ultimate optimism on that question. When Victoria dies, she tells the other characters in this story, there will be riots and murders, uprisings and mob rule as the world tries to shake itself into a different shape in the understanding of her absence. This is a Victoria who has regrets about some of her earlier actions, and who might, just possibly, be in the market for solutions that help her sleep a little easier.

None of which ostensibly explains why she’s swanning about on Victoria’s Most Haunted – a sea fort off the coast of Portsmouth, built to fight a French invasion which never came. Nor, for that matter, why she’s bringing the Maharaja Duleep Singh (Paul Bazely) along with her. The two have a somewhat spiky relationship – as the title Maharaja might suggest, he was born to one of India’s ruling families, but raised at court as a proper English gentleman (official version) or an exotic performing pet (his version, and the version with which we have more sympathy in a post-imperial age with a severe colonial hangover). It’s prrrrrobably true to say though that they never held knives to each other’s throats in the real world. If that’s a detail you’ve been waiting all your life for, look no further – James Goss has got you covered.

There are…imps on the fort, or ghosts, or voices at the very least, seeming to lack bodies to carry them about, and therefore unnerving the very bejesus out of most people who visit. Not so Colonel Crackenthorpe (David Sterne), army man with a dubious history of his own – not to say rather too much of it to be credible – who’s in technical charge of the fort, and who talks to the voices, and the thing which may or may not kill them all.

There’s also a storm which patently isn’t a storm brewing off the fort, kicking the wind-driven daylights out of anyone who tries to get near. Whatever it is that connects them all is less than a fan of Queen Victoria’s – there are amends to make, truths to uncover, sentient raging aliens with which to engage, and pasts for which to atone in this tight, creepy, MR James-ish story that will seldom let you rest between the opening bars of a Torchwood theme tune re-arranged for Victorian instruments and its final resolution.

That, if anything, is the keynote – if you’re a fan of MR James, and his unnerving stories of good people with flaws and those flaws catching up with them in creepy, nerve-jangling ways, you’re going to enjoy Fortitude.

There are three such people on the sea fort (assuming we give Victoria the benefit of the doubt about her goodness by this point in her life). That makes for a lot of uncertainty, plenty of questions, and several dollops of dubious or devious motivation, all lumped together with an alien something, a bunch of arguable ghosts and a mood-storm out at sea. While James is a solid marker for whether you’ll like this story, fans of The Horror of Fang Rock, Ghost Light and even JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls should also swallow this release whole – it has the claustrophobic atmosphere and the sense of incipient disaster of Fang Rock, and the tone of Ghost Light, where no-one’s entirely sure what the hell is going on for the longest time, but everyone’s nerves are jangled by it nevertheless, a sense bolstered by Colonel Crackenthorpe at first bearing an audible resemblance to Ghost Light’s Redvers Fenn-Cooper. The Inspector Calls vibe shudders through the sense of accountability for one’s past which unites the three main characters – Victoria for her rigidity of view in her youth, which led to many errors, Crackenthrope for a possible crime which has blotted his life, and the Maharaja for an entitled indolence which has stopped him ever achieving what he might have done. There’ll be a night of reckoning on the sea fort, and little if anything is likely to be the same come the morning light.

The writing here is tense and twangs like tripwires hidden in mist, without ever looking or sounding like it tries too hard – again, the MR James reference is relevant, because that’s a trick at which he was a master. The point of which in this audio is that you engage with it tentatively, Victoria and Singh arriving on an unlikely sea fort after fighting through an impossible storm, but it winds you in, and in, and in, wraiths of wet mist pulling you into secrets, truths, half-truths, versions of reality as envisioned by each of the characters, and their interaction. Before you’re done, you’ll wonder whether one, two or all three of them are ghosts, you’ll itch to know the nature of the fort’s resident something, and you’ll find at least some of the answers to the character-questions you need answering before you dare to place your narrative trust in anyone.

Fortitude is Torchwood with a difference not just because it doesn’t feature any of the cast we’re used to, and takes us on a trip with the Institute’s founder instead. It’s different because the journey on which it takes you is chilly and clammy and damp, unnerving in a way the world’s allowed to be without a Jack Harkness or a Gwen Cooper to protect it. Unnerving in its shades of grey, its uncertainties and the shudder with which it will leave you, despite a resolution that promises some sunlight. It’s an initially unwilling confrontation of truths and mistakes, and it shows the possibility of change through communication, even when the mistakes have been grave in days gone by. Listen to Torchwood – Fortitude now, and any time you want a shiver down your spine.

Reviews Smashed by Tony J Fyler

Tone’s nnno’drunk…honesht. S’just…just…Thing.

Alcohol, like fire, is a good servant, and merciless evil bastard of a master. It can help you shut out the voice of insecurity in your head, it can lower your inhibitions, it can make the unthinkable feel like the easiest thing in the world. And it can steal away your borderlines, can turn you inside out, can make that voice come roaring back, and out, and take everybody down with you.

Alcohol is powerful, for good and for ill.

In Torchwood – Smashed, many of the characters, and most especially Gwen Cooper, played by Eve Myles, spend the majority of the run-time getting increasingly drunk. 

Hammered. Plastered. Shitfaced. Smashed.

As a dramatic exercise, that sounds rather like fun. But it’s the reasons…ohhh the reasons…behind the increasing intoxication that give Smashed both its social and political currency and the vein of darkness running right through the centre of the funny drunk people.

Glynteg was a town once. A community. But its heart, its soul, its reason for being and its ability to function as a town has been stripped. Sliced. Peeled away, layer of funding cut by layer of business closure, until Glynteg is little more than a smudge on the map where a town used to be, and where those who can’t afford to go anywhere else live.

Then the frackers came. Drillpak came.

There were refused permission to actively frack in Glynteg, but using the defunct old refinery as a way to sluice off fracking water…surely no-one could object to that?

Except things are not right in Glynteg. People are oddly ill. People who’ve drunk the water out of their own taps.

Once.

Just once.

People hear a voice in their head, a thirsty, dark, insistence voice. And then they give in.

Or, if they want to survive, they drink. Alcohol – when the water of Glynteg gets into your system, you drink, or you’re done. And once you’ve begun, you have to keep going. Once you’re drunk, you have to stay drunk, to keep the voice, and the pain, and the change at bay.

The thing about a James Goss script is he’s never afraid to pick elements of genuine science and smash them together to make something new and terrifying. The reason behind the Glynteg terror is part-fracking, part-something-else-in-the-news that locates this story in a very modernistic era of Torchwood. What’s more, Gwen’s being there at all, and the reason she’s investigating Drillpak is not classic Torchwood, but rebuilding, desperate, clawing-back-from-the-brink Torchwood – it’s a job done for the money, rather than because of the fear of alien intervention. It’s Drillpak who are paying her to investigate the complaints of the locals, to see what, if anything, needs to be done.

Gwen does encounter some fairly classic enviro-disaster tropes though: a protestor who refuses to move on and give up, Martyn (played by Omar Austin), who becomes her companion on this adventure despite having no head for alcohol himself; obstreperous locals who absolutely don’t have pitchforks or dire warnings about going up to the castle, but who nevertheless add a chorus of dark foreboding to the piece; and a smooth site manager whose reassurances are a little too slick for comfort.

What’s happening to the sluice-water at Glynteg? Mmmm, that would not only be telling, it would be to rob you of the increasing heartbeat-throb of genuine fear that invests the piece. Ultimately though, the story becomes a battle between the ever-increasingly intoxicated Gwen, who gets louder and less coherent as she goes on, and both the forces of the underground Other and those on the surface who’ve succumbed to them, as well as one particular person who knows more about what’s going on than they initially admit.

Gwen Cooper’s a Welsh Valleys girl – she can hold her drink. But how much, and how long, before her preventative drunkenness overwhelms her ability to save the world?

Smashed is absolutely an odd idea for a story, but some solid performances from the principle actors, (it’s worth listening out for Omar Austin here, he gives good companion and never falls into the inherent plot-serving traps of such a role), as well as some truly unnerving sound design, help turn what must have been either a hellishly complex or a hellishly freewheeling script into something that pulses with human realism and a creepy sense of increasing fear as control over events slips away beneath a fog of alcohol.

Give Smashed a listen – as Gwen says, ‘It’s like a Saturday night in Neath out there.’ Which, for the non-Welsh among us, means it’s wild, dangerous, absolutely off its face and not without the imminent threat of danger – but fantastic fun into the bargain.

Reviews Torchwood - Deadbeat Escape by Tony J Fyler

Tony checks in. But will he ever leave…

Bilis Manger is an unusual Torchwood villain. He’s not big and stompy and apocalyptic by any means whatsoever – to all intents and purposes he looks and sounds like a harmless, rather sweet old man. But Bilis Manger is a turner of screws, an opener of portals to ultimate chaos, a steel-spined streak of self-interest dipped in poison and chocolate.

And now he’s back.

This, in case you’re getting the wrong idea, is very very good news for Torchwood fans. Bilis has started appearing here and there in the audio Torchwood stories from Big Finish, perhaps most effectively in A Kill To A View from Torchwood: Aliens Among Us, Part 2.

Deadbeat Escape from James Goss though feels like it knocks all previous Bilis stories aside and claims the top spot, because it’s both focused and layered, delivering the horror of a kind of Hell – with Bilis as its maitre d’.

The script is teeming with what seem like influences – imagine Hotel California, just outside of Cardiff – ‘my head grew heavy and my sight grew dim, I had to stop for the night…’

When you stop at this particular bed and breakfast though, you really, truly stop. Not for nothing is it called the Traveller’s Halt. Not Rest – Halt. Strangely depressed people fill the dining room eating Soup of the Day, whatever day that is. A dripping tap in the room next door keeps you permanently awake, and the person in whose room you hear the tap is asleep like an ageing Sleeping Beauty, as though time didn’t stop when she fell asleep.

And then there’s the rain. Torrential, aggressive rain that stops you leaving. Ever.

Billis is there for reasons of his own, which it would churlish to spoil for you, but suffice it to say the story takes the form of a kind of grand tour of the guest house, Bilis showing newbie Gareth Pierce, played with a brusque aplomb by Hywel Roberts, around the physical space, the oddities it encompasses, the hopes, the opportunities – and the ungovernable, inescapable dangers, as though welcoming a fellow prisoner to this guest house of the damned.

It’s never that simple with Bilis Manger. There’s lots of talk about time, about a broken clock and a piece of the regulating clockwork, the Deadbeat Escape of the title. The thing that puts all deviations right. That’s how Bilis claims to see himself in this story – a mender of clocks, a person sensitive to the needs of time. His lectures on time and timekeeping bring a chill of Sapphire and Steel to the audio, with time as the enemy, time as the trap from which there seems to be no escape, while Gareth frets about reaching his father in hospital, who doesn’t have long left.  There’s a poignancy in Gareth’s rush to reach his father – like many of us, he has a need for closure with a parent with whom he’s had a complex relationship. But Bilis and the guesthouse of doom have other ideas.

The story has a deeply satisfying sense of pace – it’s confined, tense, almost Hammer horror stuff, but it feeds you, one clue, one revelation, one shock at a time, making you hungrier and hungrier to reach some sort of conclusion.

‘You can check out any time you like – but you can never leave.’ That’s the darkest line of Hotel California, the final shock, and it’s a line with relevance to Deadbeat Escape too – the notion of autonomy in a house that’s pitted its wits and its time against you is a cruel one, and we hear Gareth come to this startling realisation in a thoroughly vivid way. The ending of the story is perfect and chilling and a testament to the strength of Bilis Manger as a character, and to Murray Melvin’s performance as the man who does whatever is necessary. It will punch you when you finally realise what’s been going on and why – and Goss, directed by the hardcore vision of Scott Handcock, spares not a single nerve in making that punch hurt. Bilis Manger is by no means a serial killer, but his words and his attitude at the end of this story show the patience and the dedication to his own interests that you’d expect of one, as he reveals the trick behind the trap, the fix that exists for the clockwork of the house. It’s horrifying. It’s utterly, utterly horrifying…but in a way you’ll rush to listen to time and time and time again. Although, to be fair, perhaps you won’t re-listen that much – when time is so much the enemy in this story, looping your listening might feel too much like tempting fate.

Deadbeat Escape is a staggering, steel comb down the spine of a listen, that will make you gasp, make you sniff, and make you revel in the darkness of Bilis Manger. It’s a Torchwood story with only one real mention of any of the Torchwood regulars, but it works sublimely in their absence, free from the pressure of any particular goodie. Take a walk on the dark side with Bilis Manger, and dare to check in to the Traveller’s Halt – then see if you can fathom out the Deadbeat Escape.

Reviews Torchwood - Goodbye Piccadilly by Tony J Fyler

Tony goes trolling along Piccadilly.

The last time Norton Folgate, Torchwood operative from 1960s London appeared in Sergeant Andy Davidson’s life in Ghost Mission, it was to act as a ‘Torchwood assessor’ and a kind of hologram. Before long, there was alien madness, goo, squeamishness, bodies and all kinds of typical modern Torchwood nastiness.

This time, it’s Andy who’s been zapped back through time, in all his fleshy reality, and the two begin this story butt naked, handcuffed together on a bed, with a corpse in the room and the building on fire.

So – typical Wednesday in Torchwood, then.

Goodbye Piccadilly is a joyful, energetic re-pairing of Samuel Barnett as Norton and Tom Price as Andy, the perennial Torchwood bridesmaid who, in recent years, has played more and more of a part in the affairs of the worst kept secret in Cardiff. When Norton came to modern-day Cardiff, it was as something of a will o’ the wisp, a menace, a tempter who might just possibly have been on the side of the angels – but who you probably wouldn’t bet on. The mess they got into was zippy and zingy and frequently nearly fatal, and it dashed along all on all its cylinders, making listeners clamour for more.

Well – here’s more.

There’s certainly plenty of zip here, but on Norton’s home territory there’s rather more reality and – dare we say it – rather less fun. Norton takes Andy on a necessary tour of bits of Sixties London – a brothel-cum-life-drawing class, a psychic alien dancer, a horrifically bad but hunky sculptor’s studio and more – all apparently to remedy a fairly standard sci-fi trope that strikes Andy not long after he arrives in the Sixties. Turns out he has something in his brain that other people need and so Andy Davidson becomes the key to a plot by a particularly repellent mob boss.

The run around London, during which Andy is required (Hand to God, love, it’s necessary for the art) to get naked very much more than he would be in the 21^st century, does a reasonable job of showing us the distinct differences between our own world and Norton’s, especially for gay people (Being gay was still illegal in Britain until 1967, and gay men were still arrested after the law changed), but the script from James Goss does feel like it’s focused more on the journey than on any particular destination. Yes, we know the alien thing in Andy’s head is important for some reason, and yes, we do eventually get to find out what it was, but it’s something entirely unconnected to everything that’s come before, so when we learn what it is, it hits us rather more like a slap upside the head and a ‘Wait, what’s happening now?’ than an ‘Aha! That makes sense’ moment, which leaves it feeling slightly like an add-on out of nowhere. Fun, absolutely, in a way that will make you want to dig out your classic sci-fi DVDs. Or your soundtrack. But still, it comes at us from nowhere in the script, and dares you to argue with it on any logical grounds.

If Norton is a somewhat frenetic host in the 1960s, dragging the 21^st century copper from pillar to post in an attempt to get him cured, or disarmed, or both, Andy shows again why he’d be pretty much at home in Torchwood, not only dealing with the mob boss in an intelligent ‘Bezzie Mates With Gwen Cooper’ style, but working out an additional twist in the tale just as the end crowds down around the story. It’s an ending that leaves plenty of questions open for a third instalment with this pairing, who are, whatever the storyline, character gold together and so demands more stories that showcase their double act. 

Goodbye Piccadilly is value for your Norton-Andy money any day of the week. Just be ready for the breathless Sixties London romp, and a conclusion that probably even TV Torchwood would not be bold enough to offer.

Reviews Torchwood - Instant Karma by Tony J Fyler

Heads explode. Tony walks by, whistling…

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

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

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

Would you do it?

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews Torchwood: Corpse Day by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s spending the year dead for tax reasons.

Torchwood spent the vast majority of its time dealing with aliens or things coughed up by the rift – it was part of the programme’s remit that that’s what Torchwood was about: protecting the world from alien or trans-temporal threats.

Which meant that when it brought the evil down to a simple, pure, everyday human level, it scared the living daylights out of us. Think Suzie. Think Countrycide. Think the government’s responses in both Children of Earth and Miracle Day. Torchwood is actually at its scariest when we are the bad guys.

Over the years, Big Finish Productions has taken Torchwood forward to the far future, back almost to its Victorian beginnings, and dropped in on a number of different Torchwood teams to the one we’re familiar with from the TV version. It’s also been able to round up almost all the original TV Torchwood team at some point or other, to expand their arcs and give them additional stories. Even Indira Varma as Suzie Costello – the team member who had to die in Episode 1 to make way for team regular Gwen Cooper – has been back to Torchwood at Big Finish.

Almost all the team has.

Corpse Day is a bit of a special release then, because it finally closes the loop on ‘original Torchwood members coming back,’ as the multi-talented and ultra-busy Burn Gorman comes, at least in spirit, back to Cardiff Bay as Dr Owen Harper. The headline to which is that it sounds like he’s never been away. Gorman’s proved his mettle many times on stage and screen since being killed off in Series 2 of Torchwood, but listening to Corpse Day, you’re right back in his era of the show, remembering how much fun the moany, seemingly world-weary doctor was to have around.

The premise is pretty straightforward – it’s ‘Urban Deliverance,’ or ‘City Centre Countrycide,’ an ordinary day, if such a thing ever exists in Torchwood, goes spectacularly, weirdly wrong and dark and ghastly during the course of routine enquiries, leading to the majority of the story being spent in another world entirely – the world behind someone else’s front door.

There are all sorts of themes tangled together there; urban isolation, casual racism, how you never know what goes on behind the smiles of your neighbours etc. But Gorman’s Owen has a deeper, more existential journey to go on in this story too – revealing and to some extent resolving the seeming contradiction at the heart of his character in Series 2, the ‘world-weariness’ that sits alongside a fierce determination to live, to survive, because for Owen, with the unique perspective of a dead man who won’t die, that’s all there is.

He’s helped on this journey by being paired for the first time with Tom Price’s PC Andy Davidson, dealing with ‘Corpse Day,’ a typically grandiose title for a bit of grim filing work, a very Torchwood idea from James Goss, and the two together give the first quarter of the story some solid light relief, Andy’s generally open-minded joie de vivre first clashing, and then blending well with Owen’s stark appreciations of life, people and much of the universe. There’s a great gag early on which we won’t spoil for you, but which will sing to anyone who’s ever been on a diet, and these two work well as a kind of Odd Couple of attitudes to life in general and Torchwood in particular. Once they’ve disturbed Nigel Betts’ Glynn in the middle of putting up a spice rack though, their lives are destined to change significantly, at least in the short term, and they enter a world of grief, loneliness, violence, brainwashing and oh, oh, oh the grimness.

TV Torchwood only rarely went as dark as this, so be prepared for a white-knuckle ride into domestic horror as Corpse Day threatens to earn its name, revealing layer after layer of appalling detail of what human beings will do, what they’ll condition themselves to, in order to survive. The existential journey for Owen though shines through the writing and Gorman plays it not as a road to Damascus (that would be far too jolly) but as a final-analysis scorched earth understanding of why, for instance, he’s right for Torchwood, and why perhaps PC Andy isn’t. Along the way, we also come to realise explicitly a few things we’ve only ever really suspected about Owen’ character before, so the story delivers value for your characterisation-money. Meanwhile, PC Andy, on the same journey of self-discovery with Owen, more or less travels it the other way, as questions of life at any cost or life in circumstances of utter grimness are put. You could claim this story puts the sides of the pro-life/pro-choice debate (though it would be moderately ironic to harp on that angle, given that the characters who take sides in it are both male), but it’s never overtly foregrounded or preachy, it’s too busy focusing on the sweaty, claustrophobic drama of a messed-up situation into which our Torchwood team simply stumble by virtue of their own curiosity. It’s horror movie meets real life long-term kidnap story, a simple world spun out to madness behind a perfectly ordinary front door.

Burn Gorman shines throughout Corpse Day, not just because of the novelty of hearing him as Owen again, but because he’s able to invest the character’s journey with enough light, shade and doubt to keep him interesting all the way through. Price, while inhabiting the seemingly more straightforward character of PC Andy, also gives us plenty to listen to, digging beneath the surface of everyone’s favourite ‘ordinary bloke’ to uncover both conscience and judgment. Betts as Glynn is hugely believable, dancing on the line of ‘nice old bloke’ and ‘demagogue of his own world’ – a line genuinely walked by many older men who ‘rule’ their households. And Hannah Maddox, Alex Tregear and Rhian Blundell, as the three ‘daughters’ of Betts’ domestic King Lear, deserve special mentions, each frequently and rightly stealing the show with the power of their performances, and their ability, when needed, to turn on a dime.

Corpse Day is not by any means an easy listen – there’s kidnap, torture, a degree of humiliation, strong inferences of cannibalism and an uncomfortable background of sexual slavery over the course of this one-hour story. But as a re-introduction for Owen Harper during his ‘Dead Man Walking’ phase, when he’s learning how important life can be, it’s a triumph. You will re-listen to this one, even when you know all its twists and turns and gruesome revelations. You’ll re-listen for the quality of the acting from practically every voice in the story, for the philosophical pondering and the dark wondering about what you’d do that it will force on you, and for the sticky dark energy of the whole production. You will re-listen to Corpse Day because it’s both dark and funny in a way you can only really get with Dr Owen Harper.

And now he’s back.