Big Finish Reviews+ The Third Doctor Adventures, Volume 4 by Tony J Fyler

Tony goes retro.

The Third Doctor Adventures are, all things considered, one of the biggest risks Big Finish has taken in recent years. Recasting so huge a character as the Third Doctor, rather than having his words voiced by a contemporary castmember as they did throughout the Companion Chronicles, could have gone so, so, so wrong.

Fortunately, Big Finish is a company that lives and breathes in the audiosphere – they know voices. They know timbres. They know when they’ve found someone who can do something really quite extraordinary.

Step forward Tim Treloar, as the new, audio-specific Third Doctor.

Treloar, always conscious of the potential for things to go horribly wrong, began the Third Doctor Adventures with staggering diligence and a voice that was almost spookily Pertweean. Fans reacted well, and more and more Third Doctor Adventures were written. As a performance, Treloar’s gets better and better from a starting point of excellence, with the result that, while he started out with all-new adventures and monsters, as time has gone on, and with confidence growing all round, Big Finish has pitched him against some of Doctor Who’s finest – in the second box set, he faced off against an acolyte of the Master’s, and in the third, he took on the Daleks in an immediately post-Spiridon adventure that ticked all the Third Doctor boxes for longstanding fans.

It’s fair to say though that the Fourth set of Third Doctor Adventures is something extra special. Here he gets to take on the Meddling Monk (as most recently played on audio by Rufus Hound, clearly lapping up a role for which he was born, and (most thrillingly, because fans abhor a villain-vacuum and The Five Doctors was cheating) the Cybermen.

The Rise of the New Humans by Guy Adams, done slightly differently, could have been a cracking Cyberman story – but here, it’s delivered as Monk-fun all the way, with creepy hospitals, hyper-evolving humans developing metal prostheses and coming back at least a little way from the dead, ladling on the body-horror core of the story. But, and here’s the important bit, Adams does good service by the Monk’s core characteristics too, while raising an entirely reasonable ethical conundrum – if your partner, your parent, your friend was dying of a dread disease which is currently incurable, but which a hundred years from now is the work of a course of drugs to eliminate, could you see the bigger picture of the web of time, or would you want them cured? The Monk, supporting the work of genius Doctor Kurdi (played with fabulous grumpiness and then, as her character unfolds, with surprising tenderness by Mina Anwar), is offering tomorrow’s medicine, today. Who is the Doctor to stop him and tell him he’s wrong?

Katy Manning’s on sensational form, somehow squeezing her 2017 voice back a few decades into the throat of squeaky, breathy, top companion Jo.

What The Rise of the New Humans gives us is a couple of hours of peak performances from Hound, Treloar, Manning, Anwar and others, with some interesting philosophical questions thrown in to what becomes a kind of medical zombie movie with a wider scope. You’ll barely realise you’re zooming through the episodes, and Hound, who’s established himself as a Monk with whom to conjure, more than repays his star villain billing.

The Tyrants of Logic by Marc Platt does everything it can to be a kind of Ultimate Cyber-Story, touching on the past of the metal monsters from Mondas in the Classic TV show, the extended world of Big Finish and the New Who expansions of their abilities. Set on a planet named Burnt Salt, it includes a couple of semi-Cyber ragamuffins, a host of genetically engineered so-cute-you-could-die lemur-girl creatures who throw snowballs at Cybermen, a research project which may well have more to it than meets the cybernetic eye, the Cyber-wars equivalent of Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer, and, in a way that resonates with a Dalek Genesis Arc, a mysterious MacGuffin known as a Cyber-Leveller – we won’t spoilt the surprise of what that does for you, because…well, because it would spoil the surprise.

There are Cybermats here, there are glitterguns, and when things really get moving, there are what sound like an array of Cybermen from Nick Briggs – listen out and see if you can ‘place’ each type of Cyber-voice in their evolution, complete with different Cyber-gun sounds, but there’s also a New Who-style innovation which is absolutely spot-on for how the Cybermen should behave if we’re to take them seriously as a body-horror monster for the 21^st century, and the threat at the heart of an all-out war with humanity. Again, Treloar and Manning are on the top of their game together, secure after three previous sets of adventures, and able to deliver some of Platt’s more emotional dialogue, Manning chiming perfectly with her on-screen portrayal of Jo, refusing to give up on the Doctor, talking him back from the brink of death at least once, and Treloar for his part giving the Third Doctor some lovely believable vocal beats of gratitude for all she’s done for him.

You might just possibly feel it’s a touch too busy and a little downbeat for much of its run-time, but everything and everyone in the story has a clear purpose, and were you to remove them, you’d diminish the journey on which Platt wants to take you. Do you feel like you’ve enjoyed a thoroughly satisfying Cyber-story by the end? Almost – but in terms of the balance, Platt, and Briggs on direction, skew towards giving you a story of the people, rather than a stereoscopic Cyber-story. Does it deliver that rarest of things – a Cyber-story that actually makes some sort of logical sense? Yes, on balance it does, certainly more than almost any Cyber-story in at least Classic Who. Perversely, but also joyfully, you’ll come out the other side of The Tyrants of Logic with your emotions having been put through the wringer, proving above all that you’re not yet ready to side with the Cybermen.

The Third Doctor Volume 4 is a fabulous investment in aural pleasure. All hail Tim Treloar and Katy Manning for bringing the Third Doctor and Jo fully back to the fans. And while we’re about it, all hail the writers and directors who, increasingly secure in their performances and their relationship, are giving them bigger and better and broader things to do.

The question now is how lucky Big Finish feels – in the fifth box set that must surely follow this tour de force, does it yet have the cojones to re-cast Roger Delgado’s Master?

Big Finish Reviews+ The Wormery by Tony J Fyler

Tony Fyler has worms. May need a pill to sort him out.

Or a Tequila Slammer, that works too.

Apparently.

We saw in Series 9 of Doctor Who how found footage can be used on screen to create… well, something, anyway. The Wormery takes us into a kind of audio version of the same technique, but with notably more success: an old Scottish lady is talking to a man who’s interested in some spools of reel-to-reel tape she has, recordings of her time and the conversations she overheard while working as a hostess in Bianca’s, an exclusive nightclub in World War II Berlin. When the Sixth Doctor drops in to hear the owner-chanteusse sing her famous midnight songs, he’s aghast to find an old…friend there before him. Iris Wildthyme, the peripatetic temporal adventuress (as played by the force of nature that is Katy Manning, rather less conspicuously than usual – at several points here you might wonder if this version of Iris actually is played by Manning, her characterization is so immersive), is in Bianca’s, looking a sight, being a pain and knocking back tequila like it’s going out of fashion (which to be fair, in war-torn Berlin, it probably was). Through spool after spool of tape, with occasional convenient narrative leaps from the woman, we get to listen in on a night out with Iris and the Doctor.

What unfolds from this premise is a sharp, intoxicating cocktail of worms and weirdness, as it turns out Bianca’s isn’t quite what people think it is. There are plots and sub-plots; Bianca has an agenda that can’t be guessed at, but which owes something to another Sixth Doctor story, this one on-screen, with her increasingly irritable manager Henry hatching slither-brained schemes of his own and Iris introducing the idea of paralytic karaoke to Western Europe a few decades early. Two cataclysmic physicists who, to say the least, aren’t from round here add an air of mystery, and there’s a sense of Bianca’s having escaped from an episode of Sapphire and Steel, especially when its true nature and purpose is revealed. As Iris drinks not so much to forget as to focus, the Doctor finds himself succumbing not only to the house special, but to the charms of Bianca. Could she really be the companion to end all companions, the one to sway the Time Lord who once wrote a paper on the precise chemical and neurological equation of love, and steal his celibate hearts?

Or is that just the alcohol talking? Whispering, sibilant in his head?

The worms of the title are an oddly cerebral idea in among all the karaoke, tequila and slurring talk of love. They’re largely kept on the periphery of events, a kind of nebulous atom bomb threat ringing the rim of the adventure while the characters get increasingly drunk and deadly, though they do represent the fundamental duality of Doctor Who – change or stasis, good or evil, stability or chaos. That duality is resolved with a surprising ease about three quarters of the way through the story, by which point it has ceased to be our primary concern in any case, if it ever was. By the time the worms stop being a worry, we’re more fascinated by the character dynamics – why does Bianca have one of Iris’ old dressing rooms at the club? Why does she have some of her old clothes? And why does she seem to have such a deep connection to the Doctor? Could it be that they have a history that neither Iris nor the Sixth Doctor himself can yet guess at?

The story, by Stephen Cole and Paul Magrs, exists simultaneously on several levels, and there’s every chance if you try to follow the high-falutin’ ‘weird science’ plotline, you’ll tie yourself in knots of vermicelli before you’re halfway through The Wormery. To be honest though, as is frequently the case in stories which bear Magrs’ imprint, it’s the characters you really invest in and that really deliver the drama you’re looking for. Jane McFarlane as Mickey, the Scottish hostess, is likeable in both her old lady guide and as a young woman, Manning’s Iris Wildthyme continues to be delicious – she’s an incorrigible nightmare if you have to mop up after her, but arguably the same could be said about the Doctor, and there’s a line here that bears a direct link to the Doctor’s approach to what he does – “I am always serious about what I do, though not always about the way I do it,” which makes us think it really could be Iris that the Doctor is ultimately destined to travel through life with. It would be interesting to hear her with a less fundamentally upright and morally straightforward Doctor (Number Ten might be especially combustible – Big Finish, just saying…Tennant and Manning, maybe?) The point is, long before the multi-coloured Doctor arrived in Bianca’s, blundering into adventure in his usual haphazard manner, Iris Wildthyme was on the case of something deeply fishy going on in the nightclub, for which the worms are little more than bait. Meanwhile, Bianca, played by Maria McErlane (star of many shows, but identifiable in this format to a whole generation as the narrator of EuroTrash), delivers a glorious counterweight to Manning’s Wildthyme, acting almost as the Anti-Iris, particularly inasmuch as Wildthyme announces that she fancies all the other Doctors, but not so much the Sixth incarnation, while it’s precisely that incarnation – loquacious, philosophical, morally upright – that interests Bianca. Hearing the two women almost scratch each other’s eyes out over the Doctor is rather joyous, and when Bianca reveals her actual plans and her connection to the Doctor, there’s a moment that’ll catch your breath as you realise the scale of what you’re hearing.

Overall, The Wormery is fun. Fun with a high ballsiness content to attempt, let alone pull off, the storyline it delivers, and some great performances, particularly from Manning, McErlane and Baker up front. The business of the worms themselves is complex and you may have to hold your head perfectly steady to stop your brains leaking out of your ears if you try and make such a mundane thing as sense out of it, but get down and dirty with the characters and it will repay your investment time after time. 

Big Finish Reviews+ Iris Wildthyme Series 1 by Simon Mallinson

Iris Wildthyme Series 1

Written by Paul Magrs

Starring Katy Manning, Ortis Deley, David Benson, Ann Bryson, Stephen Chance, Duncan Wisbey, Simon Guerrier, Michael Hobbs and Lizzie Hopley.
Reviewed by Simon Mallinson

Released November 2005

Now this month is dedicated to Katy Manning, whose warmth and genius is taken for granted.  This actor in Doctor Who tends to have a hard time.  Okay, but I tell you watch her stories again, and really listen and watch and you will start to see a whole new side which is more than screaming (though Katy is a master or mistress of this).

Katy in Big Finish has found an ideal medium, her silky smooth voice lures you in and her passion smacks you on the lips.  Katy gives Jo Grant a new life with Big Finish and aren’t I glad.  So Big Finish gang we want more Jo.

This month instead of doing two Jo stories, one in Zone and one here I have decided to treat you to another side of Katy.

A side where, the words Panda, Gin and Bus figures heavily, specially Gin. 

Tom and Panda are living a relatively quiet life back on Earth, as a successful novelist of science fiction adventures and his toy panda, respectively, when Iris Wildthyme makes a re-appearance!

I have to admit I had to listen to this three times before I could stop laughing enough to write anything.  The interplay between Iris (Katy Manning) and Panda (David Benson) had me in tears, almost to the point of choking on me gin.  The northernish accent of Katy was so damn good I can’t stop saying eh up chuck pass the gin, and David’s constant rant of Bear, BEAR has me wishing I could see this in cartoon form.

Also Ortis Deley had me feeling sympathy, cos I admit we fans are a really damn weird bunch.  Special mention goes to Simon Guerrier who played the fan perfectly (wonder where he got the motivation).