Reviews The Five People You Kill in Middlesbrough by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s…not going to Middlesbrough. 

Spoiler: if you’re a fan of Doctor Who or Torchwood who complains that the show is too busy pushing a woke agenda, and that you don’t like it when it gets all political – switch off this audio immediately. It’s not for you. 

But then, if you’re one of those fans, Doctor Who since practically the dawn of Jon Pertwee hasn’t been for you, so how you’re still here is a mystery. 

But this Torchwood story, more than most Doctor Who or Torchwood, is in your face political. 

It’s also in your face relevant, with a staggeringly incompetent government and a cloud of death that can kill on contact (in this case, the result of a crashed spaceship in Middlesbrough, rather than, say, a pandemic virus). Also in this audio, a dithering, worse-than-useless Leader of the Opposition, too terrified to annoy anyone to actually do anything (though with an unfortunate tendency to find themselves accidentally supporting extreme right-wing events with gifts of jam (ahem!). The operator of a billion-pound health app that doesn’t actually work? Yep, she’s here too. A government spin doctor who breaks the rules he himself sets (complete with mention of getting his eyes tested)? Check. Demented radio ‘truther’ who believes in the New World Order of ‘banking powers’ being behind all the ‘lies’ about a Middlesbrough incident? Yep, we have one of those too. 

The Five People You Kill In Middlesbrough is a phenomenally brave Torchwood story to release in the current climate. But if for instance you’re a fan of verifiable reality and virology, and not a fan of political idiocy, chicanery, and apathy, conspiracy theories, antisemitism or the staggering human gullibility that has cost huge numbers of lives in our real world, you’ll probably love it. 

I absolutely love it. Which tells you where I stand on a whole lot of issues. 

The weird thing about this release, if anything, is that it exists at all. Pitching Yvonne Hartman against more or less the whole modern British world takes her beyond any prior Torchwood world or timeline – even the world of the ‘New Torchwood’ box sets, Aliens Among Us and God Among Us. Trying to fit it into any real Torchwood chronology is probably a mistake. It’s more or less an unashamed cri de coeur on behalf of the rational in an increasingly insane world, and an example of what someone who had the power and opportunity of Torchwood behind them could do if they existed in our world and had frankly had enough of it all. 

Another slightly odd note of course is that Yvonne Hartman in TV Torchwood – and largely in the subsequent audios – has some practically 19^th century views on ‘making Britain great again,’ and cares for ‘the people’ in a more or less abstract, ‘they should be protected for now, if all else fails’ way, rather than with any particular warmth or emotional engagement. 

But there is of course one thing that absolutely gets Yvonne Hartman’s goat, and that’s inefficiency. Throughout The Five People You Kill In Middlesbrough, she advocates tirelessly for a simple solution. The so-called Icarus Protocol – nice work in the naming department, there – would prevent any alien devastation from, say, a crashed spaceship – from affecting (or indeed, infecting) anywhere else beyond a given boundary. But the Secretary of State for Defence, Alfie Scott (Tim Bentinck giving us his ‘bluff northerner’ – in a performance very close to his ‘Tommy’ of Torchwood One, again suggesting Middlesbrough is not to be taken as part of any previous Torchwood chronology) has ‘received other science, and we’re following that science’- which amounts to little more than building a ring road. Even when it emerges that the Defence Secretary’s other pet project, a missile program, may have been responsible for shooting down the ship that devastated Middlesbrough in the first place, and that the ambassador of the aliens in question has a plan that could easily undo the devastating damage of the crash, Yvonne can’t make those in government listen to her, can’t make them give enough of a toss about human beings to put aside their self-interest. 

When it comes to cordoning off the rest of the country and the world from the disaster hotspot, she runs into crisis manager Mo Simister (Sara Powell), who costs the public billions of poundsworth of tax revenue for a particle tracking phone app that simply doesn’t and never could work, and who pays a specialist in red carpets to establish a cordon. With her, it’s not that Yvonne gets further, particularly, but she does plague the ever-living daylights out of her, using Torchwood tech to try and make Mo see sense. 

We won’t spoiler you with the details of whether she succeeds. We’ll just refer you back to the title of the release… 

With short-sighted political guru Caspar Beacham (only the actual Dennis Law, popping his Big Finish cherry, and appearing to have a good deal of fun doing everything but driving to Barnard Castle), Yvonne is more fundamentalist, essentially tricking him into breaking his own rules in full view of the public, and letting the world’s media know that people should evacuate from London in a big hurry, because after all, when the rats are leaving, it’s time to pack a bag and drive into gridlock. 

And with Lancelyn Green, the ‘banking interests’ truther who describes himself as ‘The Lance Of Truth,’ we get the only real hint that The Five People You Kill In Middlesbrough fits into any kind of Torchwood chronology, because Yvonne uses a piece of alien tech that is the subject of a previous release, The Crown, by Jonathan Barnes. 

Without spoiling it for you if you haven’t heard it yet, it’s an interesting dip-back into previous Torchwood audio, and ultimately, if it existed, it would be too tempting to use on fact-averse, fact-perverse bloviating spokespeople for the absurd, because if you argue with them, you just become ‘part of the plot,’ and their audience believe everything they say – to the collective harm of the whole society. The Torchwood solution is intensely cruel – but also more effective than anything available to us in the real world. 

Sure, Yvonne’s way impacts the whole ‘freedom of speech’ thing, but she’s convinced it’s for the betterment of society as a whole after some of Lance’s listeners die, marching confidently into the cloud of Middlesbrough-death because they believe his proclamations that the Middlesbrough crash is a hoax designed to keep people controlled. 

Overall, The Five People You Kill In Middlesbrough will be a cathartic experience for lots of people frustrated by the catastrophic, deadly folly of some leading western governments. If, like many people, you’re convinced that there are bacteria in a deep ocean trench that could handle a national or international disaster better than the government you have, you’ll find yourself identifying with Yvonne’s frustration as she comes up against ineptitude, self-interest, graft, lies, idiocy and utter contempt for human life. 

For anyone who thinks science-fiction shouldn’t come close to real-world politics – less cathartic, more irritating. That’s probably a criticism Big Finish is anticipating, because the piece itself is said to be written by… Yvonne Hartman. Mm-hmm. 

In which case, all hail, Ms Hartman. You did your duty, for queen, country, and rationality.

Sure, a handful of people had to die. The world kinda got better as a result though, so, no harm, no foul, just possibly the best Big Finish of 2021 so far. There’s been some absolutely breath-taking drama from Big Finish in 2021 of course, but if you need the kind of catharsis of a world-class truth-telling stand-up comedian to shake out some of your fury at the world in which we live, The Five People You Kill In Middlesbrough is going to ring every bell you have.

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: Drive by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s lost in Cardiff. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews 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 Torchwood: Lease of Life Review by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s coming down with a mould. 

A writer’s world will frequently make its way into their work. When Robert Holmes had what he decided was an unreasonable tax demand, for instance, he gave Doctor Who the immortal story of The Sunmakers.

There’s a sense in which you have to assume that Aaron Lamont, writer of Lease Of Life, had quite the experience of student accommodation.

In a 3-bedroom house near to the centre of Cardiff live Ellie (Rosalie Craig), Seren (Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo), and Nye (Angus Yellowlees).

They…have a mould problem.

Fortunately, Cardiff Council’s leading mould specialist, Dr Owen Harper, is on hand to investigate.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That sound in your head is the story stretching out in front of you.

Mould is of course a famous and well-used wordless ‘villain’ in science fiction and horror. Like fog, it’s natural, spreading – and you can’t reason with it. It just eats.

It eats a lot in Lease of Life.

It seems hardly spoilerific to say that the mould in Seren’s house is not from round here. In fact, Owen’s seen it before, but usually, Torchwood gets on the case a lot faster than it does this time.

So from almost the word go in this story, Owen’s on a race against time. Time, and a mould from outer space.

Just as a heads-up, when you listen to Lease Of Life…maybe make sure you do it in the daytime.

 

Like most similar stories, the progression here is through stages of decay, and the stakes elevate as the story goes along. When it starts, it’s just mould. A patch of mould.

Sure, who cares, right? Spot a student house without mould, you’re on to a good thing.

But more or less from the moment Owen arrives, the mould shows its true…well, not colours, obviously, but its true potential, certainly. Ellie, Seren and Nye are not students, but they could well be – they’re each in a kind of stasis when Owen arrives. Seren in particular is putting up with the grimness of the house so she can save up the money to go travelling and see the world. Ellie doesn’t especially like either of our housemates, and Nye is out a lot, and playing loud music to isolate himself from the reality of the house and his housemates when he’s in.

It’s the very definition of dysfunction, and the mould, for all it’s an alien life-form intent on eating everything with which it comes into contact, is also a handy metaphor for the toxic isolation of modern life, where conversation and potential friendship is eaten alive by self-revolution and our own concerns.

If Ellie, Nye, Seren and Owen work together, there’s a chance they can get rid of the mould.

So… that’s simple, then.

Except before you know what’s happening, Ellie’s gone out on a run, potentially spreading mould spores over a 6km radius, the kitchen floor’s collapsed and a meeting with the landlord does nothing to resolve the situation.

When Owen finds the source of the mould, it becomes appallingly apparent that Dr Owen Harper, one of Torchwood’s finest, is way out of his league against a houseful of unthinking infection.

In fact, the worse the situation becomes, the less likely a solution seems to be.

It would spoil the building of the drama to tell you exactly what happens, but perhaps it’s fair to say that in stories where Owen Harper takes centre stage, things are rarely less than grim, and there’s usually a body-count.

Mould versus humans. Just saying. You’re going to need more than a damp cloth.

When a solution is eventually found, it’s very much last-ditch, do-this-or-destroy-the-world in its nature, and it demands at least one sacrifice to implement. The escalation takes a patch of mould into a full-on horror story, and as in most horror stories, the odds of everyone getting out alive are slim.

In Torchwood horror stories of course, the odds of anyone getting out alive are pretty slim. This is no exception, but what it delivers is a solidly human fear, developing beyond the scope in which we usually experience it. It also gives you a reasonable allegory of isolation and how it leads to disaster, some engaging characterisation, and a story in which Owen is able to shine.

Lease Of Life will have you checking your ceilings, looking behind your bookcases and scrubbing extra hard. Kill the mould. Kill it all…

Just sayin’…

 

 

Reviews Rhys & Ianto's Excellent Barbeque by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s heating up the barbie. 

Rhys Williams – lorry driver. Lad’s lad. Valleys Boy, Mammy’s Boy, grown up to be the man who gives Gwen Cooper’s bonkers Torchwood life its anchor. Its grounding. It’s “yes, you saved the world again, love, but where’s the chips?” reality check. 

Ianto Jones. Welsh-born, but fled to “better” things in London. Torchwood operative in Canary Wharf. Brought down to Earth by its destruction. Coffee boy to Torchwood 3, struggling to feel like part of the team. 

Together. Alone. At a backyard barbecue. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

Ohhh, a fair amount, in Tim Foley’s story of not only an odd couple forced to interact against the will of either party, but of men and the way they deal with – or don’t deal with – stress, grief, friendship, loss, hard decisions and barbecuing. 

This is a story of a barbecue that doesn’t so much go wrong as never really get started.

There are Torchwood threads, absolutely, but really, it’s an intervention story. A revelation story. A tale of bottling up, bubbling, and various versions of masculinity at play. 

Rhys and Ianto rarely had any proper one-on-one time in TV Torchwood, and with the best will in the world, it’s easy to understand what. While their technical backgrounds are similar, their ways through the world are very different. Rhys is a bloke, a lad – one who appreciates what he has, understands the strength of traditional male bonding rituals (like barbecue, and nights in pubs that end with somebody wearing a traffic cone), who works hard and is fiercely loyal to his friends, his family, and his community. 

Ianto’s not a lad. He’s a Welsh metrosexual – it’s like a regular metrosexual, only with more eyebrow-raising and use of the word “Really?” 

The thing is, they’re both very likeable people – you just wouldn’t necessarily put them in a room together and say “Go play.” 

Tim Foley’s trapped them in a backyard together, and told them to go play. 

Here’s the thing you need to know about Rhys And Ianto’s Excellent Barbecue. It’s much more subtle than that title makes it sound. 

In fact, it’s more or less a sociological masterpiece in full lad-camouflage. 

Rhys is having a barbecue. He’s having the lads round for a good old-fashioned beerfest with probably poorly cooked meat, raucous laughter, shared memories and…there was another thing…oh, yes - more beer. 

Except, oddly enough…he isn’t. Nobody’s turned up. None of the lads are coming. They’ve all got other things to be doing. Even Badger, who was absolutely vital to the success of the night, cries off, citing an anxious child and a hamster emergency at home. 

Then Ianto turns up. 

Ianto, who, because with his wine rather than beer, his suit rather than casual gear, his highfalutin’ London ways and the fact that he works for a top-secret agency dealing with alien problems…wasn’t invited. 

And then, almost as though Ianto’s a bad penny of alien, space-time gittery, the bubble arrives. 

The bubble? Think of a Coronavirus bubble, a group of people who live in and around each other and so theoretically shouldn’t be a threat to one another. 

Then expunge that thought immediately – this is Torchwood, dammit, not a public information film. These are space-time bubbles, blown up out of nowhere to separate whoever’s inside them from the rest of the space-time continuum, just as though they’ve been taken out of time, separated by a dimensional veil and locked away from the rest of the universe. Like death – or at least, like a very effective pause button. 

When they get a phone call from Badger, things have almost reached peak weird. 

When Badger turns out not to be Badger – it’s Torchwood time. 

You don’t need us to tell you this is a particularly appropriate story for the time of Covid – the tale of small, isolated groups of people, perhaps not the people we’d ideally like to be with, separated from everyone else and with just a handful of survival protocols to deal with the reality of the situation, seem more or less written to reach out and touch audiences right now.

That there’s more to it than that surface resonance is probably a given too, but we’re not about to spoil the deeper levels of connection for you. 

More than the Covid connection though, this is a story for the Lads. The bros. My dudes. The guys. My mates. The compadres. The posse. The crew. All those weird collective names we use to somehow soften or de-intensify the relationships that let men love and care for their circle of male friends. It’s both an interesting tribute to those circles of friends, and an exploration of why they regularly fail. 

Most men have groups of other men who know their stories so well they don’t mind when we tell them for the thousandth time. Friends who were probably there for the making of our legends, and who, by being in them, own a part of our lives, our collective memory. Even, to some extent, our soul. 

This is a story about those groups. And it’s a story about what happens when part of such a circle isn’t there anymore. When it should be. When we know something’s happened, but have no way of processing its mystery. When the network of companionship doesn’t work, doesn’t allow for truth beyond our legendary bluster, and we can’t find the words to move on.

Heavy stuff? 

It might sound like it, and there’s absolutely a dwarf star-heavy core at the heart of Rhys And Ianto’s Excellent Barbecue. There’s an important question in that heart, and the playing out of answers. But there’s also Rhys, for instance, “going to twat an invisible wall with a croquet mallet.” There’s the odd couple comedy of Rhys and Ianto, embodying two ways of being a man, trying to find common ground through the guy-ritual of roasted meat. There’s quite enough creepy Torchwood to go around, with the space-time bubbles popping up all over Cardiff and then (and if you wanted a ticking clock to your Torchwood story, this is as good as they come) shrinking, trapping those inside them until they wink out of existence. There’s a mystery in the Badger Who Isn’t Badger, and a powerful, heartbreaking quest to do the right thing by that character, even when Rhys and Ianto are in no position to even help themselves. 

There are breakthroughs, and character dynamics never fully explored before as Rhys and Ianto work together to solve problems, both in space-time and in the possibly toxic established patterns of group masculinity. There are reasons no-one turns up at Rhys’ barbecue apart from the uninvited Torchwood coffee boy, and they need to be addressed if Rhys’s personality is to reset itself from his recent grumpy form into the lad that everybody likes, or loves, or wants to be with. He needs some hard schooling, and he needs a space to speak about why the barbecue is so important to him. 

What Rhys And Ianto’s Excellent Barbecue ultimately does is talk about an important social point, without at any time bashing you over the head with it. It gives you great odd couple chemistry, and a solidly what-the-hell Torchwood story of bubbles and isolation. And in working together not only to sort out their own predicament but that of the Badger Who Isn’t Badger, it gives Rhys and Ianto time to each appreciate the other’s strengths, rather than maintaining their surface understanding of each other’s stereotypes. 

You’ll absolutely laugh yourself to hooting and tears as Kai Owen as Rhys and Gareth David-Lloyd as Ianto pitch their performances at jusssst the right level of social awkwardness to let the comedy bristle. That’s no real surprise – we’ve seen and heard each of them separately deliver glorious comedy in their Torchwood careers. Bringing them together could have gone so badly wrong, it’s a mark of courage that the pitch was ever made. But together, they pull off what is mostly a two-hander (with occasional unnerving interruptions from Youssef Kerkour as both Badger and “Badger”) that just sings its comedic potential up to a whole new level. 

But while the keynote is comedy, you’ll also feel the feels. Oh man, the feels. Tim Foley’s written a script that makes you laugh until you manly-don’t-cry, and then takes you beyond that point. Kai Owen in particular nails that journey to the front of your consciousness, and makes you want to hear more Rhys-centred stories in the future. 

Isolation is a big problem in our real world right now. It’s a problem made worse and more serious between men who can’t share the truth of what they feel. Traditional lads, who are used to their connections being occasion-based. Legend-based. Story-based, rather than truth or confession-based. 

Check in with your lads when you get a chance. Be real with them. Break through the legend to the people underneath. Otherwise, we might have to send Rhys and Ianto round to burn meat in your back garden. 

2020 has been a pretty phenomenal year for audio Torchwood at Big Finish. 

Well, quite, which year isn’t a pretty phenomenal year for Torchwood at Big Finish? But just towards the end there, the company may well have sneaked in a story which takes the crown of the year. If you do little else in December lockdown, or while waiting for the world to change in January, give yourself a treat. Invite yourself to Rhys and Ianto’s Excellent Barbecue, and prepare for a spot of much-needed catharsis.

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 Iceberg by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s getting chilly.

Owen Harper has had a troubled life. The acerbic medic of Torchwood in Cardiff Bay might – and arguably should – be forgiven his seemingly cold, shallow, hostile nature when you look at what has happened to him. His life and happiness having been originally bound up in a love and a career, he’s an object lesson in playing society’s game… until the game plays far too harshly with him, his love is taken from him, and his skills remain, his open-heartedness replaced with a burning need to understand, to make sense of the senseless, and to do some sort of good in an ultimately meaningless cosmos.

Writers in the audio world have not for the most part been kind to Own Harper.

They’ve been good to him, yes, giving him some meaty scripts, having him tackle a suburban charnel house, a mass murderer’s burial grounds, and the career-minded enthusiasm of Ianto Jones. But kind, no. Owen’s generally had a godawful time in his audio career at Big Finish. See also the suburban charnel house, the mass murderer’s killing grounds and…you get the picture.

In Grace Knight’s Iceberg, there is at least initially less blatant horror in store for Owen, but still there’s challenging territory for the man who can’t allow himself to look backwards because it hurts too much.

A phone call at 1 in the morning. The voice of an old friend.

An old friend who Owen, under the guise of having too much new demanding stuff to do after the death of his fiancée Katie and the new job he mysteriously took up, had gently ghosted, unable to deal with human connections to his old life that left him raw.

But it’s 1 in the morning. He answers before he can think.

And it’s Amira.

Amira, the friend of both Katie and that younger, more hopeful Owen. A voice from the past.

More to the point, when he answers her call, she has a mystery for him. A doctor herself, she has a patient who’s in at least most of a coma. The patient, Lucy, wakes for brief periods, has a totally lucid conversation with the ghost of her dead sister, who she insists is standing in the room, and then goes back to dreamland.

But something’s all sorts of wrong with her chemistry levels. And Amira, despite having a legitimate concern for her patient and a keenness to haul Owen over the friendliest of coals for his abandonment of her and everyone in the wake of Katie’s death, has moments when she blanks on basic medical procedure.

The more we learn of Lucy’s predicament, the more we understand why this is a Torchwood story. Lucy (played by Lowri Walton) is a young woman already haunted by the memory of her dead sister before that sister comes to pay her visits in the hospital. Amira (played by Maya Saroya strongly enough to stand up to Burn Gorman’s Owen) has secrets of her own, which Owen must unravel if anything about this night call to an otherwise eerily silent hospital is to make sense. And not to put too fine a point on it, he’d better hurry.

Iceberg is an intriguing mixture of things. On the one hand, it gives us more and meatier detail of Owen’s pre-Torchwood past, his life, his love, the way he reacted when Katie died, and, thanks to one blistering outburst, played to the nail by Burn Gorman, the workings of his mind when he forced himself to become the character we first met in TV Torchwood, Series 1. On the other, it’s an example of the ticking-clock mysteries at which audio Torchwood excels – separating one team member from all the rest, dropping them into a seemingly devastating, inescapable conundrum with a countdown of which they may or may not be aware, and challenging them to prove their Torchwood worthiness, their ability to think through the facts, accept a wider universe than the Earth, work the problem and earn their right to survive.

Burn Gorman when he first arrived on our screens in Torchwood might have had what seemed like an easy character to play – the brash, the shallow, the self-revolving but misanthropic doctor with the sharp wit and the impeccable medical skills. But well within his time on-screen he was able to bring out deeper levels to the character. In audio, Owen’s resourcefulness, his compassion for patients and people and aliens alike has been matured into a guiding principle that has survived some of the worst things imaginable in both an ordinary human life and the life of an alien investigator. More than just Owen’s skills have survived from his past life, the life in which he loved Katie and had his future to look forward to. The reasons he got up in the morning to use those skills are still intact too, the need to make people better. Iceberg shows us that very clearly, shows us his take on the Hippocratic Oath, shows us a lot of classic Owen spikiness, and ultimately shows us the steel in his spine which has let Owen survive.

The point about Owen Harper as a character is that he’s determined to survive. Life threw some of the worst imaginable luck at him, made him grieve for the person he loved and who made him better. But Owen after that… will. Not. Break. Will never break, will never become a victim of the grief that could split him apart. He’ll do everything he can for everyone who needs him, and he’ll make the hard decisions of life and death when he needs to, as he needs to here, with the practised, practical application of a doctor. Even when he should by all rights be dead, Owen won’t, and doesn’t, give up. Even when he sees what’s beyond the point of death, and knows it’s nothing, and that everyone he’s ever loved and lost has gone to equal nothing, Owen Harper will survive.

Will he survive Iceberg though? When something alien, something creepy, and something from his past combine in one exhausted 1AM, will Owen have the strength he needs to survive? When the dead seem to walk and the familiar comes unstuck and the hospital is silent in the middle of the night, Will Owen Harper be able to find the truth to explain the evidence in front of him, even when it seems absurd?

As a ticking-clock mystery, Iceberg works well. As a study in the character of Owen Harper, it works even better. The writing’s pin-sharp, for all the situation it creates is impressively mysterious for most of the run-time. The performances from the three cast members are joyously jagged, Owen reacting to the intrusion from his past and the problem in front of him instinctively but never easily. As a whole, if you’ve not heard Iceberg, you’ve missed out on a rich, cold, sharp, sweet, sour and bang to rights slice of Owen Harper’s life. Don’t do that to yourself. Give Iceberg a listen now.

Reviews Tropical Beach Sounds by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s chilling beachside.

If you’re looking for soothing British voices, you can’t go far wrong with Michael Palin. Python, world traveller and interpreter of the world’s many wonderful madnesses for the viewer at home, Michael Palin, when he wants to use it, has one of those voices that can make you believe things are all about to work out just fine.

Jussssst fine…

While presumably the Tim Foley’s script came first, it’s a joy that Tropical Beach Sounds and Other Relaxing Seascapes #4 seems to absolutely need a voice like Palin’s.

It starts off like a relaxation or meditation tape, all inner light and breathing in, but evolves into something more akin to a walk-through Choose Your Own Adventure book, as the voice of Palin – and make no mistake, it’s identified as the voice of Palin within the piece - takes ‘you’ on a journey through the inner mindscapes that make up your psychology. Joyfully ripping the piss out of the ever over-convenient translation of things and people into archetypes and psychobabble, it takes you on a journey into something called…The Hub. The Hub is a closed mind, it tells you, that needs to be opened to let the light in. Captain Jack is the Captain of your Destiny, the version of You that you were meant to be. Ianto Jones is the spirit of positivity. Toshiko Sato is all things intellectual and inquisitive, Owen Harper all things dark and negative…and so on.

It’s an invasion story, absolutely, but it’s delivered in the tones of Palin as a psychic and psychological battle between good and evil, yin and yang, the force of authority and the force of…of…of something or someone who keeps trying to turn the tour back into a simple seaside meandering.

Palin is of course well experienced with vast swathes of text, but he’s actually the only voice you hear throughout this story, which makes it a remarkable achievement. The storyline itself – invasion via meditation and psychobabble balderdash – is very cheeky, very Torchwood and inordinately good fun. Plus you get to hear Michael Palin turn on the dime of a moment, from calming presence in your head to vicious, swearing, power-addicted monster, quite prepared to prey not only on your deeper psychological fears, but to threaten pain, humiliation, you name it, when ‘you’ don’t do as he wants. It’s a rewarding listen, this story, but for something with perhaps the oddest title in at least recent Big Finish history, it has moments that are swift as a dagger and dark as motive. Be warned – you probably need to be having an ‘up’ day to get through this one unaffected by the manipulations of its villain, because there are times when that villain echoes all the darkest thoughts you’ll have had about yourself, and the ending, while it’s ultimately positive, isn’t fought on the same battleground, so it might not give you the psychological rebalancing you need.

Normally of course there’d be performances to extol, but as a single-voice audio, it’s all Palin, all the time, and as such, it’s all pure joy. In fact, there are moments when the power that is Palin helps sell some of the script’s balder patches. Certainly, those patches are necessary to get you from the A-B of the story, but in lesser hands, they might well have fallen flat – moments for instance where the villainous voice in your head is clearly scrabbling for inventions to fit in with the psychobabble of the meditation tape ethos by which it lures its victims in, seeming to riff freely in the moment. That’s dangerous writing because it flirts along the borderline of intended floundering (in the writing) and unintended floundering, in the seeming moment of the invention by the villainous character, and you need someone with a particular gift for insouciance to sell the idea. Michael Palin, fortunately, brings exactly what you need to the recording.

There’s a very Invisible Enemy vibe to this story, but with twinkly achievement-noises every time ‘you’ have a human interaction with one of the Torchwood team – it’s not exactly a ‘Contact has been made’ moment, but it’s close – and what is actually happening, who and what the villain actually is remains a little unclear, but as the battle rages on for control of ‘you,’ Palin is able to imbue his own voice with the personalities of two separate characters at war, and while he rages and threatens the psychological violence of all your bad memories set free to flood through your mind, it’s actually just as often the physical threat inherent in the loss of control of your body that will make you go cold in this story – the Palin-voiced villain tells you they can make you do anything, and there are several examples of self-harm here, from the holding of a breath to the point of passing out to hitting a door over and over again, for no other reason that it hurts and damages the host, the ‘you’ that is increasingly controlled by the voice in your head.

The resolution to the story seems to suffer slightly from the single voice format – it feels like when the power of goodness is victorious, it could actually do with separation into the second voice, the voice of the force that’s been trying to frustrate the Palin-villain all the way through the story, but that would probably lessen the sense of awe that this story carries by being single-voice from start to finish.

All in all, Tropical Beach Sounds and Other Relaxing Seascapes #4 is absolutely worth a listen, not least because it’s an hour of Michael Palin speaking into your ear, but also because it acts as a kind of metaphor for the battle between positive and negative impulses, positive and negative views of yourself that will resonate with many listeners and fascinate even more. As a Torchwood story, it’s a neat inversion of the normal, with the story more or less told from the point of view of the villain, and oh yeah, did we mention it’s Michael Freakin’ Palin as a devious voice-villain from the depths of Who-Knows-Where trying to take over the hub through a meditation tape!

Don’t hesitate – it’s not like you can experience actual beach sounds right now. Experience the next best thing with audio Torchwood and Tropical Beach Sounds and Other Relaxing Seascapes #4.