Who Reviews The Flight of the Sun God by Tony J Fyler

Here comes the sun, sings Tony.

The new Sixth Doctor and Peri audio story from the BBC, read by Nicola Bryant, is a bit of a bumper, Christmas-movie selection box of Doctor Who. It’s a disaster movie, a whodunnit, a mistaken identity comedy, a body horror creepshow – and a comment on the wisdom of letting unstable rich people run your lives.

Which in 2019, can’t be any kind of bad thing.

The Sun God of the title is a gigantic spaceship. It’s all a bit Red Dwarf in its initial purpose – it has scoops and such to suck the energy out of suns, sell the energy back to planets at a profit, and massively enrich the already monstrously rich mogul at the head of the company, the oft-mentioned, rarely-seen Spalding Revere.

When the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on the Sun God, naturally enough, Something Is Going Wrong. An executive engineer has been missing, apparently yomping among the pipes for several weeks now, and no-one can really be bothered to go looking for him. There are creepy eyes in the darkness of the ducting, and the ship seems to have been dipped in the golden style of one of the gaudier Egyptian emperors. Added to which, the executive board have been waiting for their lord and master to show up to a board meeting for three days, and the ship might, or might not, be where it’s supposed to be.

Oh and Spalding Revere turns out to be a dead ringer for he of the noble brow and the very loud voice – yes, for reasons that may or may not become apparent, this is a Doctor’s doppelganger story, just to add impetus to everything else.

That’s the set of operating conditions with which writer Nev Fountain presents us when we begin our journey on the Sun God. Big sun-sucking ship, looking like an Egyptian sarcophagus, weird goings-on down on the lower decks, missing mogul, Doctor-doppelganger and a ship going less right than would really be ideal.

From this positive cornucopia of elements, he weaves quite the adventure story, the tension mounting as problem follows problem. He manages to separate the Doctor and Peri effectively, each of them gaining an alternative companion for the run-time of the story, as the Doctor hob-nobs with the high-ups (who at least initially think he’s their boss), and Peri – but naturally – gets stuck in the pipes and the venting with all the curious scuttly things and whatever it is that made the engineer go missing.

There are certainly elements that will ring tonal bells here – it’s difficult to escape the feel of Voyage of the Damned, with its big extravagant ship, quest for survival and gittish mogul at the heart of the story, and the initial set-up blends elements of The Sun Makers and 42, with a dash of Pyramids of Mars at least about its décor. But Nev Fountain builds the storytelling up, crisis by crisis, so even though sometimes when a story-element appears, you find yourself thinking ‘Aha! That’ll be useful when the Thing happens!’, when the Thing then eventually does happen, you’re caught up enough in the forward momentum of the storytelling not to mind being right. And far from falling into predictability, there are surprises along the way that you won’t necessarily see coming, but which, when everything is unravelled, make a satisfying sense.

Perhaps best of all is the meeting of the Doctor and the ultimate villain of the piece. You’ll get the feeling of what the plot-behind-the-plot is before you get there, and it will most likely blow your hair back with the sense of the villain’s entitlement and egomania. When they come face to face, not only will you get the full force of that entitlement, some resonances with our own world which will have occurred to you get a wink of confirmation from Fountain which throws the whole situation into a context that will live with you after you finish listening to the story.

Rather joyfully though, while you’ll have worked out a handful of ways in which the ultimate crisis on board the Sun God can be resolved, the actual solution will probably be none of those, but it will make properly plotted sense, underlining that sense you get when watching or listening to one of the better Doctor Who stories that these things have been thought through both as a writer and from the point of view of the potential listener. To some extent, Fountain plots the whole adventure that way, like an Agatha Christie story, giving you clues, allowing you to run a little ahead, then blocking off or opening up pathways to your next big plot point. It all makes for a very satisfying listen.

Nicola Bryant on reading duties here does what she always does when called on to read an audio story – she puts the work in, giving you narration in her more natural voice, and delivering a Peri you remember, but also populating the story with a range of voices which bring the thing to life and let you sink into the drama of it, both in terms of creepy things in the ducting and bigger, less personal, more screaming cliff-hanger style threats.

All in all, The Flight Of The Sun God’s a great listen that build in intensity, and gives you that connection to our own world and what’s happening to it. It’ll make you smile, and shudder, and nod in recognition at the end.

Take a flight on board the Sun God. Things are about to get nuts.

Big Finish Reviews+ Paper Cuts by Jeff Goddard

Ten years ago, this month saw the Draconians make their first appearance in the main range of Doctor Who audios from Big Finish, and with Marc Platt writing for them they did so with all the style and grace one associates with them. Paper Cuts places the Doctor firmly into the heart of the Draconian court, not once but twice, and answers the question first raised in Frontier in Space of how exactly an outsider became a noble of Draconia, a race absolutely steeped in tradition.

It is that deep culture and heritage that Platt brings to the fore here, and while it is reminiscent of Japanese culture it has its own uniqueness to make it truly alien. Draconia is a society that holds its traditions as sacrosanct, as it has always been, so shall it always be so. But when the Doctor, in an earlier (although unspecified) incarnation became an advisor to the XV Emperor, the Red Emperor, early in his reign he unwittingly drew the ire of those who held those traditions closest to their hearts when, for the sake of the entire species he suggested Draconia close itself off from the rest of the galaxy until a space-plague had passed, foreseeing the destruction and death that it would cause. In a move that would cause untold hardship for his peoples the Red Emperor took the Doctors advice, saving his peoples, but with its own price….

Now in his sixth incarnation the Doctor has been summonsed back to Draconia by the Red Emperor himself, some 60 years later and with ‘Charley’ in tow (more of this shortly). The Deathless Emperor is lying in state and his successor is to be named, but only after a three-day vigil of contemplation has been completed.

The four vigilantes (the highest, the lowest, the bravest and the wisest) in the Emperors tomb, in the Celestial Heaven above the planet soon learn that they are playing a deadly game, one that it seems none of them are expected to survive and that not all the participants are openly declared. As the Doctor, The Emperors Son, a lowly Fisher-Catcher and the Emperor’s former bodyguard gather together to become playing pieces on the board the stakes raise ever higher, especially with the High Priest playing their own game.

Paper Cuts never relents in its pace or imagery and has the feel and tone of a real whodunnit with just a twist of the mystical. It is a story of lyrical visuals, and the performances of all the cast bring it to vivid life, painting its pictures as the paper walls of the Emperor’s Tomb paint the pictures of people’s memories. With killer Origami Sazou (Draconian Chess) pieces, a space necropolis of the interred yet deathless Emperors of Draconia, and galaxy spanning Empires forced into seclusion this is a story of scale but told with a deceptively small cast of characters and with a delightfully light hand.

The sixth Doctor and Charley work beautifully as a pair, which is odd when you consider how well-known Charley is for her time with the eighth incarnation of our beloved Time Lord. But there is something about Colin Baker and India Fisher’s chemistry together that just works. Its not the same relationship, but its equally as engaging, even if Charley isn’t quite herself. Which brings me to the point I alluded to earlier. Paper Cuts could be listened to as a stand-alone story, but it is really part of a longer series of stories that sees an interloper, Mila, masquerading as Charlotte Pollard desperate to taste adventures with the Doctor for herself (and all to herself). As such there are out of character moments that throw you, especially if you listen to it as I did for this review for the first time in a long time and out of sequence.

But none of that detracts from the spectacle and grandeur of the story itself. Colin Baker is at his warm and charming best as the Doctor here, having finally reached that happy point for which he had always aimed when he started out all those years ago, thanks to his time with Big Finish. He and Fisher get a slightly easier job than the rest of the cast in this affair, as they play the only non-Draconians in the whole story. It is up to everyone else to bring the sibilant reptile species to life, and this they do with the same truth and poise as their television counterparts all those years ago.

Anthony Glennon’s arrogant and loathsome Prince has exactly the right tones of haughty entitlement one would expect from the first-hatched and heir apparent. Sara Crowe as the Queen Mother obsessed with the traditions of Draconia and driven by ambitions for her son gives an amazing performance. The lowly Fisher-Catcher played by Paul Thornley provides us with the most relatable character – just wanting to go home, even if it is full of hungry mouths to feed, and it’s a shame Mila would ensure we wouldn’t get to see a little more of the character. John Banks completes the main cast with his noble and earnest soldier, another solid performance that never fails to ring utterly true. We must also give special mention to Nicholas Briggs of course who along with directing, provides a chilling backdrop with his deathless Emperor – never failing to send the blood running just a little colder, probably aptly given this is a story about reptiles.

Ten years on Paper Cuts is just as sharp (pun possibly intended), just as vivid and vital as it was when it came it. If you haven’t listened to it for a while or have never listened to it than its ten-year anniversary may just be the time to do it! You certainly wont regret it.

My life at your command.

Who Reviews The Mysterious Planet by Tony J Fyler

Tony objects!

When Doctor Who came back in 1986, it was a programme on a mission. It had taken its first bloody nose in over twenty years, being pulled off the air after a single season of the Sixth Doctor. It was a programme increasingly misunderstood and disregarded by the senior executives at the BBC, and with a style that had arguably coarsened its attitude towards explicit violence in Colin Baker’s first season: Lytton’s bleeding wrists in Attack of the Cybermen; the acid bath quipping and the Doctor personally springing the trap which kills Quillam in squirming agony in Vengeance on Varos; the Doctor personally throttle-poisoning Shockeye in The Two Doctors, again quipping to the corpse; and even Peri getting in on the murderous action in Revelation of the Daleks. It was in danger of marginalising itself and it had its credentials as the cornerstone of family viewing to re-establish. It had to prove it could do what it had always done – win families to sit together for 25 minutes a week and cheer for a hero.

What the Trial season delivered, in hindsight, was absolutely the wrong way to go about doing that job – one overarching storyline over fourteen episodes, in an era when much of Britain still saw TV as a watch-it-or-miss-it event, made it easier for people to get lost. And the trial structure itself seems misjudged on two levels – it keeps interrupting the action for irritating dialogue at one remove, and if you’ve been off the air for eighteen months, it’s only wise to come back and put yourself on very public trial if you smash it out of the park, and the Trial, for many reasons, doesn’t.

In The Mysterious Planet though, there is a very strong drive towards renaissance, towards back-to-basics adventuring in a classic Doctor Who style.

In fact it would be hard to find a more classic, safe, straightforward offering than the basis of The Mysterious Planet. It’s right there in the title: what’s Doctor Who about? Going to mysterious planets. Bang, there you go. What’s more, for its first screen time in eighteen months, John Nathan-Turner brought back former script editor and frequent scripting gold miner Robert ‘The Governor’ Holmes, to give us a couple of hours of running about with savages, very thirsty people in Tube stations and a great – arguably the greatest – Holmesian secondary character double act ever, in Sabalom Glitz and his partner Dibber.

But before we even got there, the Production Team were making statements. Fans are still divided over this thirty years later, because we really know how to hold a grudge, but The Mysterious Planet opened up with a brand new theme arrangement. And it was, at least to this fan, bouncing up and down in anticipation of the return of the brash, bold Doctor in his paint-explosion coat, a massive disappointment. At thirty years’ remove, you can see the point of Dominic Glynne’s arrangement – going back to the more spooky, mysterious, ‘Ooh, who is the Doctor?’ vibe of the utterly classic original version, only spangled and twangled for the eighties audience. It was an attempt to soften the programme’s offering, to make it ‘more like people remember’ for fans tuning in after the long Who-drought, and for people who weren’t fans, but would be checking what Doctor Who was like these days now it was back. But the visuals of the title sequence weren’t changed accordingly, so to many, it felt weak, lacking the undeniable punch of Peter Howell’s version.

But once The Mysterious Planet opens, there’s a great single-finger salute to all the tired hacks who had talked about the show’s ‘dodgy effects and wobbly sets’ during the eighteen-month hiatus. That opening sequence of the space station still stands up today, and it was a punch in the mouth to those who thought Doctor Who was the home of poor effects. ‘See this? Shut up. Thank you – Next!’

Oh. Next.

Next was the trial opening, and my goodness it’s long, and slow, and quiet, and tedious, and has Lynda Bellingham (still at the time fighting to escape her typecasting as ‘The Oxo Mum’ from a series of adverts that first brought her to widespread fame), dressed in a lightweight Time Lord headdress that looks as though it’s been made on Blue Peter out of a couple of coat hangers and a pair of white tights (It was the mid-eighties, this was entirely possible). It goes on forever, and tests the patience of even long-term fans. And then, eventually, The Mysterious Planet can really begin, with the Time Lords all settling down, essentially, to watch a Doctor Who story.

Now, when it gets going, The Mysterious Planet is a really good, fun, utterly unchallenging and unthreatening Doctor Who story in the Classic tradition, not least because it’s a Robert Holmes showreel of the best bits of his Who-writing career. Strange planet, with a problem. Bizarre coincidences – finding Marble Arch Tube station overgrown with foliage on an alien planet. A drab, humourless society, as in The Sunmakers. The Tube-dwellers make perfect sense, and yet at the same time, there’s a whacking great slab of satire in there, the society held in rigid, need-based stasis by a robot who can’t see beyond the remit of his function (Holmes re-pulps the central idea of the Sontarans in Drathro. He will execute you rather than help you, because there’s a protocol to maintain). A resistance movement – Merdeen’s runners, who become the Tribe of the Free. A kerfuffle over a bit of high technology treated as a sacred artefact (as in The Ribos Operation), two of the brightest students chosen to go and help the alien lord in his castle (The Krotons), and the fantastically rogueish (and here, more than ever again, more than a little psychotic) Glitz and Dibber, like Garron and Unstoffe turned up to eleven, with Tony Selby as Glitz stealing many scenes. The point about The Mysterious Planet is that it’s a great, enjoyable, clever, logical, satirical and character-rich Doctor Who story, of the kind that Robert Holmes could deliver in his sleep, with both hands tied behind his back and a woodpecker on his head. The Production Team luck right the hell out with guest actors too – Tom ‘Duggan Lives!’ Chadbon turning in a very different performance as Merdeen, Joan Sims, bless her, clearly having no idea what she’s taking part in, but giving it her spirited all as Queen Katryca anyway, Adam Blackwood giving Balazar a naïve charm that makes his cluelessness all the funnier, and Tony Selby striding and conning his way through the whole thing like a gleeful teddy bear with a very big gun.

It's important that during the eighteen months we’ve been away, there’s been a thawing of the relationship between Peri and the Doctor, and Holmes in The Mysterious Planet gives us a glimpse of the Sixth Doctor and Peri as we could have enjoyed them going forward. The L1 and L3 robots, while not exactly sophisticated, are certainly a cut above the likes of the Sontarans and the Borad from the previous season in terms of believability, and left alone, The Mysterious Planet would have been a cracking, if ultimately inconsequential return to the storytelling values of Tom Baker’s time – if never a Robots of Death or a Pyramids of Mars, then certainly on a par with stories like The Android Invasion or The Hand of Fear.

But it couldn’t be left alone. Holmes was saddled with the trial format to work into the story and there seems to be a note of Holmes the storyteller injected into the Doctor’s frequent and tiresome interruptions – ‘Are you really offering this inconsequential silliness as evidence?’ Perhaps the episode 1 climax is the ultimate example of what is wrong with The Mysterious Planet. A perfectly good cliff-hanger – the Doctor being stoned to death – is sacrificed by a return to the courtroom, and the Doctor voices the opinion of viewers when he says ‘Oh, why did you stop it at the best bit, I was rather enjoying that!’ There’s more tedious toing and froing between the courtroom players, and the episode ends not with actual peril being shown, but with Michael Jayston’s Valeyard telling us all of peril, and that the Doctor’s life is in danger. While bowing to no-one in my appreciation of Michael Jayston and his voice, it’s no substitute for a good stoning (and the fact is, it’s a cliff-hanger that’s repeated almost verbatim at the end of episode 4). The trial sections ruin what would otherwise be a perfectly serviceable runaround story to open Season 23, robbing it of impact and drama, and adding nothing but court dialogue and tedium.

The Mysterious Planet is still highly watchable popcorn Who after thirty years. But a special edition with all the court segments edited out would be far more actively entertaining. The blu-ray version’s coming this year. Twitter campaign to include a trial-free version, anyone?

Big Finish Reviews+ Memories of a Tyrant by Tony J Fyler

Directed by John Ainsworth.

Tony’s getting forgetful.

At its best, science fiction makes us ask questions about the world in which we live. Memories of a Tyrant, by Roland Moore, asks us to consider the time limit we place on vengeance and justice, by using an old man with dementia as the lynch pin in a moral maze, with occasional divergences into an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery.

Garius Moro may or may not be a tyrant from decades ago, who used an apocalyptic weapon and killed billions. He’s aged since then, whoever he is, and dementia has crept over his mind, so he has no hard memory of those days. And there’s only one surviving image of the tyrant – a blurry snap of a man on a balcony. Is it him? Who can tell? And, more to the point, if he can no longer remember it, does it matter? What would punishing a frail, decrepit old man, lost in the fog of his own forgetfulness, achieve?

But then, if he is the fabled tyrant and mass murderer, should age and feebleness let him escape a retribution that would bring closure to the descendants of his victims?

Told you it was a moral maze.

This is all given a healthy coat of sci-fi imagination when the Sixth Doctor and Peri are called in by an old friend of the Doctor’s to a space station colloquially called The Memory Farm – a place where even long dormant or forgotten memories can be resurrected in perfect clarity, and in Moro’s case, possibly used against him in a court of law. There are forces that want him convicted and killed, forces that want him exonerated and set free, and forces that just want to see justice done. And into this powder keg strides the man in the multicoloured coat and his American friend.

There are, it’s fair to say, plot holes here big enough to drive a Tardis through – there seems little reason the Doctor couldn’t pop back with a camera, get them a better image of the tyrant and help clarify matters. Come to that, he could pop back and observe Moro as a younger man, to trace the truth of his story. Less forgivable than this, a well-liked character in this story gets killed more or less because the Doctor doesn’t feel like nipping back to the Tardis for a piece of kit.

But the story endears itself to listeners on many levels – it’s got the moral maze at its heart, but it also has Peri wanting to use the facility to recapture fading memories of her dad from when she was a little girl, which makes you want to give the grown-up Peri a hug. And it also has a much more warm and friendly relationship between the Sixth Doctor and Peri than was frequently seen on screen – as Peri says here, ‘Oh, we had our ups and downs, but now… yes, we’re friends,’ which makes them a much more attractive listen than they were in the spiky years.

There’s also an appreciable amount of solid technological imagination in this story – the idea of memory as both the thing that defines our personality, and as a potential commercial resource, has resonances of Philip K Dick’s We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which is as much of a recommendation as any modern writer could need. The plot of the second half of the story delivers some hefty consequences to the commoditisation of memory, which imperil the Doctor’s life, limb and reputation, and give Peri a really strong arc as an avatar of truth and justice, while also involving a couple of more common-or-garden murders to solve along the way. It’s really Peri who’s the Miss Marple of the piece, fighting against a reality that seems entirely changed, in order to get to the truth in which she believes – and any story that gives Nicola Bryant something strong to do with Peri gets our vote any day of the week.

Memories of a Tyrant does all the things you want good, exciting science fiction to do, and it does them with a Tardis Team that’s been redeemed on audio from the skew-whiff destiny of its TV days. Have a listen, and let them play with your mind.

Big Finish Reviews+ Under Odin's Eye by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s in need of some retail therapy.

The Short Trips range allows Big Finish to tell stories that expand the universe of each Doctor, but to do it with particular challenges – they’re written as an ‘audiobook’ rather than as a play for voices. They’re short stories, equivalent to two Classic TV episodes, and the challenge is frequently to balance stories that add significantly to the legend of their Doctor or companion, while ideally saying something to make fans and new listeners think, smile and click the buy button on other stories in the range.

Under ODIN’s Eye, by Alice Cavender, gets quite a lot of this right. It’s a story that balances issues of cultural overwriting, distraction commerce, and fear of power with a couple of above-average gags at the expense of an identifiable Nordic furniture store, a missing personas plotline and a potential invasion, allowing the Sixth Doctor and Peri to both have their righteous indignation and dash about being heroic.

So – all good there, then.

Certainly, given the Short Trips releases only cost £2.99, you get your money’s worth of entertainment here and then some. If something doesn’t click, it’s in the final layer of the storytelling that connects all the plot-dots, which should lead to a whole picture and deliver the oomph, the satisfaction of a mystery solved, a crisis averted, evil defeated and home in time for meatballs. Here, it feels as though a handful of dots are joined, absolutely, but some are missed, and their lack in the overall drive to the finish leads to an underpowered, slightly underwhelming ending.

Again though, it’s important to understand exactly how much is going on here – Alice Cavender delivers plenty of humour, a good dose of, if not exactly Nordic Noir, then at least Nordic Noisette, some solidly rationalistic politics in terms of the ethics of humungo-megastores sucking the lifeblood out of local economies and, inevitably, out of local cultures too. There’s even, in one of the connections that works, a kind of ‘rape and pillage’ Viking element in all that, because we’re not at any point actually on a planet with a Norway here – just one that has a fondness for Nordic culture, etymology and bookcases. And then of course there’s the characterisation. Plots are all very well, and if it’s fairly straightforward, there certainly is one here. Underlying political consciences are great too, and this has one of those too. But a Doctor Who story doesn’t really work without strong characters, and Cavender, by no means a novice in the realms of different Doctors, brings the Time Lord of Moral Indignation bellowing to life here, while Nicola (Peri) Bryant works hard to give the Sixth Doctor, Peri, and the cast of villains, victims, and the somewhat undecided, their personalities in vivid vocal colour.

No review of Under ODIN’s Eye would be entirely complete without a degree of comparison to the Series 11 take on global capitalist icons, so with the inevitability of a QI contestant shuffling towards the wrong-answer klaxon, let’s get the Kerblam! comparison out of the way. Under ODIN’s Eye feels rather more clear-headed and to the point in its appraisal of mega-businesses than the TV take, though Kerblam! was aiming for rather different territory, some of which was more soggy than anything here. While the Kerblam! Men themselves more potential to be memorable than the actual villains here, overall, the clarity of message, added to an ending that’s by no means as rushed as its TV fellow traveller, Under ODIN’s Eye at least draws level, and could even be said to win on points as an experience worth repeating.

All in all, for £2.99, the quibbles about a somewhat linear villainy and an ending that feels oddly inevitable melt away under the strength of characterisation here, and that clear-headed approach to the whole ‘cultural homogeneity of shopping experiences in a capitalist construct, please come again and have a nice day’ argument. Go shopping with Sixie and Peri soon, and really – try the meatballs. You’ll regret it if you don’t.

Who Reviews Attack of the Cybermen by Alex Wylie

Attack of the Cybermen is a Rollercoaster of Blood

Colin Baker's tenure as the Doctor had got off to an infamously shaky start (by shaky I mean awful; The Twin Dilemma is universally regarded as the worst introductory story of any Doctor) and then fans had another season to ...look ...forward ...to. Attack of the Cybermen at least boasted the return of an iconic monster. The then newly-regenerated Sixth Doctor was still unstable but now somewhat softened, but when people complained about the level of violence in this era of Who, this is undoubtedly one of the serials they mean. Looking back does Attack of the Cybermen redeem the Sixth Doctor after the monstrosity that was The Twin Dilemma and does it stand up as a Cyberman adventure?

Receiving a mysterious distress call, the Doctor and Peri (Nicola Bryant) land in Totters Lane, London, 1985. Nearby, Lytton (Maurice Colbourne), first seen in Resurrection of the Daleks, appears to planning a diamond heist. Meanwhile sewer workers are being picked off by an unseen force...

Something you notice when looking back at eighties who is that the Cybermen seemed to have individual personalities and were capable of differing opinions. This sort of adds something, but at the same time doesn't ring true. The RTD resurrection of the show took them back to being blank and emotionless as they were in the 1960s. For heaven's sake, in Tomb of the Cybermen only the Controller speaks! Here you have a Cyber lieutenant who thinks he knows better than the Cyber Leader! Oh but speaking of Tomb, Attack sees Michael Kilgarrif resume his role as Cyber Controller, in case you didn't know.

Bates and Stratton, two Cyber-rejects from Telos, add a great deal to this adventure. There is something about each's delivery, as well as the chemistry between Jonathon David and Michael Attwell. Their story is brutal in a way rare for classic Doctor Who, at least in its presentation. You are outside of your comfort zone here.

Equally so with Flast (Faith Brown), former leader of the Cryons, imprisoned for years and tortured by solitude. One might be out off by the Cryons' appearance, voice and mannerisms, but seeing the character and feeling her journey and her pain adds a great deal here.

This two-parter is moody, violent and uncompromising, and Malcolm Clarke's score compliments this perfectly, as it also does the still unstable temperament of the newly regenerated Doctor. The

diamond robbery story feels very rough and real, with Brian Glover and Terry Molloy (better known to fans as Davros) playing accomplice to Lytton. But then we get to Telos, and meet the Cryons, who were overly feminised to contrast with the macho, Darth Vader Cybermen of the 1980s. TV presenter Sarah Green playing Varne is an example of producer John Nathan Turner's famous tendency for stunt casting, but not recognisable anyway. The Cryons are far from an iconic Doctor Who race but there are still many scenes in episode two which are powerful and effective.

Above all Attack has a great second half, filled with action, and the ending packs a great emotional punch. Overall a tad busy and crowded with characters, but they are all very rounded and not one weak actor. Like a lot of Colin's era it isn't really child friendly and one can see why the Beeb had concerns, but it is however great for adults. And while not up to Caves of Androzani standards (what is?) it is certainly a considerable marked improvement on Dilemma. Actually, that's too faint a praise, it is leaps and bounds ahead! If you've had a downer on the Sixth Doctor's era, or have never got into it, Attack of the Cybermen is certainly one to try!

Attack of the Cybermen was written by Paula Jones and directed by Matthew Robinson.

Big Finish Reviews+ Sixth Doctor: Fortunes of War by Tony J Fyler

Read by Colin Baker.

Tony goes back to the front.

Fortunes of War is the third and – no spoilers, but probably final – part of a story which has taken three Doctors at different times in their lives to solve. As such, if you haven’t heard both of the earlier parts, Men of War and Horrors of War, you’re going to be just a little lost coming into this one.

The first two parts were read by former companion actors Peter Purves and Katy Manning, but neither of them were written from the point of view of those companions, though Steven Taylor and Jo Grant were accompanying the First and Third Doctors respectively. Here we’re blessed (general rule of thumb – this man’s presence on a project is always a blessing) by having Colin Baker read the final part of the story, and as such, we’re allowed a particular treat – a story written from the Doctor’s perspective, and narrated in the first person, in his voice.

If you react to that with a ‘So what?’ you’re missing the point. The Doctor we see on screen is almost always illuminated for us through the prism of his companions, and it depends how well they understand what’d really going on in that confounded brain of his how good an illumination that is – at the risk of infuriating the Classic Who fans, look at Amy Pond explaining the Doctor’s choice of where to stand in Asylum of the Daleks and Clara Oswald searching for a Doctor in the haystack of history for some of the best in over fifty years. But here, we’re right there in his mind, which means when the Sixth Doctor, now in rather more control of his Tardis than either of his predecessors, decides to return one final time to the trenches of World War I, we see him hesitate before opening the door, and hear him admit to us what he would never admit to a companion or the world – his trepidation at what he knows he has to do once the doors open, once events are set in motion.

What he has to do is put things right. Time has been bubbling in all the wrong places and in deadly, horrible ways in the trenches, firstly infesting the mud with the lifetimes of soldiers who ‘should’ be dead, and secondly through a kind of possession in a field hospital, with soldiers dying again and again, like a ghastly precursor of a great and terrible time war. This time when the Doctor goes back, he has to put it right, aware as he is of the consequences his actions will have.

Consequences?

Consequences, because if time is put right, the friends he made on his previous visits, Captain Mark Steadman and Nurse Annie Grantham, will have to die. Can the Doctor knowingly condemn them to death for the sake of the bigger picture, the web of time and his solemn duty as a Time Lord?

It’s a story that’s set up to tug the heartstrings right from the off, and it does that more than somewhat, especially when the source of the temporal disturbance is revealed, showing in turn the utterly ambivalent nature of the universe – it doesn’t care who lives or dies, only what is ‘right.’ Only what happens.

Baker’s performance here feels like a later, off-screen Sixth Doctor, one whose flame of moral outrage has grown a little circumspect, if not in all circumstances, then at least when faced with the impossible dilemmas not only of the First World War, but with the tangling of time and the pull of duty and compassion. What ultimately emerges is a less self-satisfied Doctor than the on-screen version ever had the chance to be, but one who faces a very ‘New Who’ dilemma, and argues it through with himself in our hearing, before proving he is the same person he’s always been, and always will be – he is the Doctor, with all that that entails. Never cruel. Never cowardly. Always clever. Always kind.

Colin Baker as an audio Doctor has been wowing audiences for more than a decade now, most especially at Big Finish. Justin Richards here gives him a chance to be perhaps more New Who than he’s ever been, and Baker eats it up with a spoon. The result is a release that you’ll devour eagerly too, for all its moral and temporal complexity, but ultimately for Baker in one of many moments of ultimate audio triumph as the Sixth Doctor, that flower of moral outrage at things that are wrong infused with an equal flood of compassion for ordinary people, and both tearing him apart, and forcing him to go to places inside himself that are uncomfortable, and do things he probably shouldn’t do. It’s a remarkable performance that’ll sweep your emotions ahead of it, and a fitting conclusion to a story that has at several points confronted us with the challenges of being the Doctor. Baker and his Sixth Doctor give us a lesson in what sets the Doctor apart from every other would-be meddler in time and space. You have to be the cleverest life form in the room, absolutely. But you also have to be the kindest.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips - The Darkened Earth by Tony J Fyler

‘Who turned out the lights?’ asks Tony.

One of the Sixth Doctor’s most recent audio companions, Leading WREN Constance Clarke, was plucked out of Bletchley Park during World War II. As such, writers of stories for her, and Miranda Raison who plays her, have been keen to balance all the characteristics that go into making a good companion – curiosity, compassion, feistiness and fun – with something of the stainless steel backbone of the time and place from which she comes.

It’s too easy these days to look back on that ‘Blitz spirit’ as a kind of hopeless naivety, a country placing its faith in its leaders and believing in an absolute right and an absolute wrong. In our world, moral relativism would cut in and short circuit any such certainty. But back then, they needed that sense of self-belief to get extraordinary things done – things which, for instance, required civilian conscription and food rationing.

Constance is a model of that spirit, a believer in goodness and evil, and of working to make the former victorious over the latter as a kind of moral duty. In The Darkened Earth, though, without especially challenging the concepts of good and evil, she certainly gets a new perspective on the wartime propaganda image of ‘our brave boys, flying off to beat the Nazis.’ It stops short of moral relativism, but it’s a broadening of natural compassion out to include ‘the enemy.’ Because John Pritchard’s script takes us to Germany during the war, to a night time full of blackouts and fear and huddling together against a threat from the skies, as British planes circle, ready to drop death on people who are, to all intents and purposes, innocent victims of the politics of their national leaders. It’s a historical reality that the air war was fought in both directions, and families in Germany took the same precautions as those in Britain, denying the enemy the chance of a target in the night. Constance has a moment of world-flipping realisation in this story, as she comes to care for a family with whom she and the Doctor join forces against an altogether more dangerous enemy.

There are some good quality scares in Pritchard’s script, and Lisa Bowerman can always be relied upon to pull them off the page. Without giving too much away, there’s a bogeyman stalking the town in the hours of darkness, who leaves people dead, and with shrivelled, useless eyes. Finding it, finding ways to communicate with it and hopefully stop it from feasting on the town, the country, and possibly the world, Constance and the Doctor have a series of logical problems to deal with, all while safeguarding a family understandably disposed to fear rather than common sense. It’s a game of blind man’s buff with a killer in the dark, and as such, there are sweaty, heart-thumping moments throughout, and Constance gets to show the goodness of her heart and the bravery that’s inherent in her by putting herself in the way of the danger to protect a family she doesn’t know, and particularly some children she comes to like, and see not as the enemy but as a hope for the future.

Is The Darkened Earth especially memorable then?

Actually yes, for a few reasons. Firstly, there’s some solid structural underpinning in Pritchard’s story, so it develops as it rolls on. Secondly, Bowerman’s direction is crisp, taking the material and pulling the maximum emotional investment out of it. There’s enough for the Doctor to do to prove himself – and the very particular Sixth Doctor quality of a fierce burning need to communicate with aggressors, to try and talk a way through to solutions, comes through strongly. But mostly, there’s Miranda Raison as Constance, giving one of the most crisp and distinctly ‘wartime English’ performances so far in her tenure as a companion, while showing her very human compassion, her empathy, her bravery and what, back in the day, she might have called her pluck. You come out of the other side of this story with either a newfound or an intensified respect for Constance Clarke, who keeps her head while letting her heart beat for the lives of others and opening her mind to a broader way of seeing the conflict with which she’s so intimately involved.

All for under £3! The Short Trips range frequently punches way above its price point, and in The Darkened Earth, John Pritchard, Lisa Bowerman and especially Miranda Raison deliver another cut-price cracker.

Big Finish Reviews+ Iron Bright by Tony J Fyler

I am Iron Man, says Tony.

Iron Bright, by Chris Chapman, promises what could be, and arguably should be, a definitive Sixth Doctor story, as it brings the man with the peacock coat face to face with a pair of Victorian geniuses – father and son team, Mark and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Sixth Doctor has form meeting Victorian geniuses – one of his best TV stories, Mark of the Rani, set him adventuring alongside George Stephenson – so there’s a frisson of hope and expectation attached to any story that takes him back into even faintly similar territory.

Chapman’s done his research – Iron Bright (the meaning of which we’re almost desperate to tell you, but won’t, so you have to listen to the story) takes us underground, into the great Thames Tunnel, where things are going wrong for the Brunels and their workers. There are cryptic ghosts that kill people, for one thing, which is going to rain on any parade you plan, and Mark Brunel (played with a good deal of bluster by Christopher Fairbank) is planning quite the subterranean shindig, to attract wealthy investors to the project. Even in this simplicity of conflicts, you’ve got a ton of story to be told, a clash of worlds to investigate, as Victorian socialites meet homicidal ghosts from Somewhere Else Entirely and try not to die underground. When the Doctor and Isambard discover where the ghosts are coming from though, the conflict takes on a whole new scale, as well as pushing us into new realms both of science fiction and of social allegory – worlds are connected together, the story tells us, and what might be seen as progress on the one could have terrible consequences on the other. It’s a notion of some relevance as our modern Earth bakes, melts and feels the fist of nature under the stress of climate change – the good times of industrial progress, if uncurbed, can lead to the devastation of a world.

The escalation of the story is logical, for all there feels like some degree of padding in the middle back at the Brunel house, and the cliffhangers are above-average here, with the shift in scale feeling like it needs you to take a bigger, deeper breath than you thought you needed as it opens up the story from the small, fairly claustrophobic world of Victorian tunnels under the Thames to much broader and very different vistas, but there are parts of the mid-section that feel like a history lesson of the world from which the ghosts are coming, and while the escalation is impressive, the context-lessons continue into Episode 4 as you find out the thing you thought was happening is actually an entirely different thing that’s happening, because of the context the Doctor discovers. You could certainly argue it’s valid to include, because the context explains the reality of what’s been going on, and ultimately directs you as to how you should feel about it, but being quite so heavily layered in context even as armies are marching to an apparently unstoppable war does make for a thicker layering of story than the pace seems to demand. There are also elements of Iron Bright which strive for more than they achieve – there’s a lovely character called Tan played by Catherine Bailey, and a maid with serious companion-potential, played by Becky Wright, who, while adding some lightness to the mixture, don’t seem to have a great deal to do except explaining some of the plot and then going back and forth to tell people things. And there’s a degree here to which invention and convolution  risk losing some listeners, especially in regard to whose fault the main threat actually is, and why, so you end up having the Brunels in a story and feeling like they’re not used as well as perhaps they could have been, as you dash back and forth from one reality to another, trying to work out what’s going on, stop a war, deal with the thorny issues of whose fault any of it is, absorb the environmental message, pause for sombre reflection on what amount to gravestones with a vengeance, climb a big tower, press a big button and play a game of chicken with a leader who’s come down with a chronic case of manifest destiny.

It’s tightly packed, this story, and no mistake. There’s just a risk of you losing the will to understand it as it switchbacks and loops the loop in time, space and dimension-bridging, while dragging along a lot of backstory and contextual information. It’s just possible, when you’re done with the ride, that you’ll wonder whether it was all actually worth it.

Iron Bright is densely packed and frenetically paced, progressing from a classic Sixth Doctor oddity to a panoramic science fiction dimensional war of conquest and survival, with perhaps just a twist or two too many for some listeners to keep hold of as it careers towards its ending. It’s worth a listen, because after all, it’s Old Sixie meeting Isambard Kingdom Brunel and absolutely boggling his mind, but it’s one to take an episode at a time, pausing every now and then to make sure you understand where you are before you go on and risk getting lost in the twists.

Big Finish Reviews+ Hour of the Cybermen by Tony J Fyler

Tony tries very hard not to just say ‘Excellent.’

Hour of the Cybermen was always going to be a very special release from Big Finish.

While Nicholas Briggs, one of the Big Finish gods, has provided voices for 21^st century Cybermen, Daleks and other alien nasties, and has also given the Cybermen of older generations his vocal talents, this is the first story that sees the return of two particular actors who were the Cybermen for a generation of fans. The Eighties brought the Cybermen out of semi-retirement and made them arguably the equals of the Daleks in the programme again. The two men responsible for the Cyber-renaissance were David Banks, who played every Cyber-leader of the decade, and Mark Hardy, who played his long-suffering, button-pushing sidekick, the Cyber-lieutenant.

Because of the nature of the role, they were always most impressively vocal performances. Hour of the Cybermen re-unites the Eighties Cybermen on audio.

Run away now and buy Hour of the Cybermen.

OK, so it was always going to be a big deal. Bringing them back to battle a Sixth Doctor played by Colin Baker on the top of his form…Run away now and buy Hour of the Cybermen.

But the news on this release is so much better even than that.

They’re a canny lot, these Big Finishers. They’ve given the task of bringing back the Lords of Logic to a writer who, above all, takes care that his stories make sense on every level – Andrew Smith – which means that for once, for once in their careers, the Cybermen, ruled by logic, have a masterplan that’s actually logical. Think about it for a second – there are probably two or three stories in the whole of Cyber-history where you could run them through a basic logic algorithm and find that they made sense. This story makes sense in both its Cyber-planning, its human skulduggery, and its ultimate resolution. It’s a Cyber-tour de force. Seriously, we’re not kidding, run away now and buy Hour of the Cybermen.

In terms of actual plot details, this is the second in a loose trilogy of stories that introduce us to an Eighties version of UNIT that we’ve never encountered before. It starts very much in Jon Pertwee territory, with the Doctor, alone, arriving in an England suffering from a particularly odd calamity – a drought without an accompanying heatwave. Water-looters are afoot, but more than that, there are alien refugees in the area, and the story builds in logical increments, so you feel you have something of a handle on. In a nod to a couple of Sixties Cyber-stories which in their own terms made some sense, the Cyber-plan here is significantly advanced, and only the Doctor popping up at an inopportune moment has any chance of stopping them. The Cyber-doohickey at the source of all the trouble makes perfect theoretical sense, and the plan into which it fits makes sense in terms of the Cybermen’s universal goals. The human (and alien) heartbeats along the line make sense too, and there’s a story-strand here that brings an element of the Cybermen to the fore that should have been exploited long before now, and which Smith threads strongly through his script.

If you’re buying this for nostalgia purposes, you’re in for all sorts of treats. The Cyber-Leader gives more than one ‘Excellent,’ and there are several lines that aren’t replays of the greatest hits, but are subtle enough reworkings to both feel fresh and evoke the Eighties Cybermen in all their relatively chatty glory. In terms of the Eighties Cyber-Leader’s habit of frequently explaining the Cyber-Plot to anyone who would listen, this ticks that box too – he even stages a demonstration of how the plot will work at one point here, and you don’t hear it as a fault in the story, because now, as then, you just want to hear David Banks’ Cyber-Leader talk more.

As with all the best Cyber-stories, there’s a fairly high body-count here, and a body-count including people about whom you’ll care, which in itself underlines the difference between the listener and the villain – the scary thing about the Cybermen is they don’t care about the people who die, and we do.

There are other significant nuggets of nostalgic Cyber-glory here too – including a moment repurposed from Earthshock which will make fans smile. And before it all becomes about Smith, Banks, Hardy and Colin Baker, listening to the music in this release will also give you chills and grins if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Cyber-geek, because again while steering clear of actual riffs on previous Cyber-themes, there’s enough here to trip your nostalgia-triggers into utter geek meltdown.

Hour of the Cybermen could well be the Cyber-story you’ve been waiting for, for decades – a tight, logical story, with the Cybermen on the top of their terrifying form, incredible Cyber-voices, human peril by the bucketload, a desperate fight for survival and a Sixth Doctor that ultimately saves the day with an audaciously straightforward bit of jiggery-pokery, and an act of important compassion.

We’ve told you already – run away now and buy Hour of the Cybermen.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Lure of the Nomad by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s feeling the lure.

Doctor Who, as Steven Moffat has repeatedly said, is a programme that eats ideas.

That’s especially true if you’re looking to create a multi-layered, believably odd take on the worlds of outer space. Fortunately, there’s Matthew J Elliott, who’s a stage magician of ideas. Give him a chance, he’ll pull a string of terribly apologetic killer service robots out of his sleeve. With a tap of his wand, he’ll pull a gaseous interior designer out of his hat, complete with a space suit to protect them from a fate worse than death – dispersal. With a quick ‘Alakazam!’ he’ll give you a Big Bad which has a touch of Elder God about it, but really rather regards the existence of the universe as the tedious trailer before the main event.

There’s more than that involved in The Lure of the Nomad, we’re just making the point that if you’re looking for a density of ideas, Matthew J Elliott’s your go-to guy.

In this story, he unapologetically introduces us to a brand new companion for the Sixth Doctor, not with a slow, considered, emotionally-driven ‘Here’s how this happened’ origin-story, but with a bang, when their adventures together are more or less over, though he does have Sixie seeming quite keen to send new boy Matthew home in a hurry, after the latter fails to see the humour in the Dead Parrot sketch, and is less than thrilled by the prospect of an education in The Goon Show (and quite right too, frankly. Humourless oik!). What seems like a simple, if unscheduled, landing though turns into something rather immensely clever – it would be quite good fun to hear the Seventh Doctor come up against the villains of this particular piece, as they have the sort of thinking-round-eighteen-dimensions mindset that would really give him something to get his brooding, monosyllabic teeth into. With Sixie, it’s a whole different process – the Sixth Doctor has a tendency to solve the problem that’s actually in front of him at any given time, which here leads us through a sequence of mini-adventures (you read the part with the terribly polite killer service robots, yes?), and running up against a truly loathesome personality in the process, Eric Drazen, played by Matthew Holness. The conceptual elegance of creatures like designer Willoway (by the way, who doesn’t love a gaseous life-form named Willoway? Good day’s work there) is striking, and adds a richness to a story that could otherwise be a fairly straightforward case of ‘What’s going on here then?’ But really it’s new companion Matthew Sharpe (Sharpe-with-an-e as he insists on telling everybody, to the point where you want to spell it wrong just to spite him), played by George Sear, and the equally gloriously-named archaeologist Juniper Hartigan, played by Anna Barry, (Anat from Day of the Daleks, if you’re trying to place the voice) who really steal this story with a couple of rock solid performances.

Perversely, trying to actually nail the story down in a handful of sentences is – in common with some other Elliott stories – particularly tricky, especially without giving the whole game away. Think ‘vaguely Vervoids inasmuch as people keep dying on a spaceship, with twinges of Fenric running through it in terms of What’s Actually Going On.’ You won’t be entirely there if you think that way, but you’ll be close enough that when you listen to it, you’ll nod occasionally and go ‘Ahhh.’

The shifting ground underneath your feet as you try to actually work out What’s Actually Going On can make The Lure Of The Nomad feel a touch exhausting round about the halfway point of Episode 3, and there’s an ending here that’s really quite emotionally cruel. The Sixth Doctor has a really hard day at the office waiting for him in trying to avoid the Lure of the Nomad, but that’s good – every now and again, we like the Doctor to have those days, they’re what set the real hardcore villains apart from villains of the week. The force we’re dealing with here could well warrant a return engagement, because they have that kind of spark – they’ve villains in emotional Doc Martens, ready to stick the boot in.

The Lure of The Nomad is a story you have to cling onto by whatever means you can – teeth, fingernails (your own for preference, but anything that works in emergencies), as it swings from whodunit to base-under-siege to whhhat-the-hell’s going on? to gigantic villainous space opera. But there are some solid, real-feeling characters along the journey, and a proper kick-in-the-face final act that more than makes the trip worthwhile.

Who Reviews Revelation of the Daleks by Tony J Fyler

Tony reveals all.

Revelation of the Daleks is so distinctive a mix of the vivid and garish and the dark and morbid, it earns its place as one of the most grand guignol stories in Doctor Who history – an entertainment so macabre as to be tasteless, but yet entirely compelling, with a mind-blowing miserablism deep down in its soul and its assessment of the morality of human beings.

The notes of its storytelling strands seem to offer a palette of depressives right from the start – Necros is a world of funeral directors, and therefore a world involved in the unsentimental business of tending to dead people, to maintain an illusion of life for their relatives until the bodies can be safely disposed of. It’s run by professional cynics and grotesques, from the emotionally desperate Tasambeker, to the have-a-go thugs, Lilt and Takis, to the ultimate sleazebag from every professional outfit everywhere, the pompous, self-revolving but never-quite-unintelligent Jobel (played with a particular knack for nastiness by Clive Swift).

It’s also a world of snow and ice, lowering the emotional temperature even further – and that’s before we even meet a disfigured, deeply confused mutant, the product of experiments by the so-called Great Healer (a title which in and of itself embodies grotesquerie). Meanwhile, there’s Alexei Sayle as the most annoying DJ in the universe, playing music to what are probably already-empty caskets; there’s the spinning head of Davros in a catacomb, like the spider at the heart of this web of bad taste; there’s the grandly-turbaned Eleanor Bron as Kara with her waspish secretary, Vogel, planning to assassinate the Great Healer; there’s  fatalistic but discredited Knight of the Grand Order of Oberon, Orcini, played with spectacular restraint by William Gaunt, and his disgusting squire, Bostock, who might be thought of as the War Baldrick. There’s not a character in the whole thing that isn’t existing on at least two levels, their public face sometimes barely hiding the darker reality underneath. Everything has that note of formal fakery that makes the world of Necros a polite and brittle lie, from the make-up on the attendants to the DJ’s ‘entertainment’, to people supposedly in suspended animation, to the idea of some of them being there only until the disease that killed them can be cured, only to have it revealed that the cure was found decades earlier, to the polystyrene monument that falls on the Doctor and the fake blood that comes with it.

And then of course there’s Natasha Stengos and her drunken doctor-friend, prowling about the catacombs looking for her father’s dead body.

It’s worth remembering that Revelation of the Daleks is a two-part, 45-minute-per-episode story, and the Doctor and Peri spend the entirety of the first part trudging through the snow, killing rather forgiving mutants, shinnying over walls rather than finding the front door, breaking pocket watches, glimpsing Daleks and then in the Doctor’s case having a fake monument fall on him – all before they even GET to Tranquil Repose. As such, Eric Saward on writing duties ‘pulls a Robert Holmes’ in making the other players and their stories so fascinating that they absolutely exist outside of the Doctor’s intervention and hold our interest. Every character has a story, a personality, an arc here, albeit most of them end in gruesome, mostly Dalek-powered death. But whereas Holmes’ fascinating secondary characters had a tendency to fall on the redeemable side of the spectrum, Saward brings undiluted, positively visceral miserablism to the screen, making all his characters phonies of some variety (with the possible exceptions of Bostock and Natasha), giving them masks to hide their real, dark natures behind, and using the notion of Davros as a corrupting agent to expose those natures.

Even when they arrive, the role of the Doctor and Peri in events as they unfold is marginal at best – Peri goes to see the DJ and helps him destroy a Dalek with ultra-directional rock and roll, while the Doctor potters about, gets locked up, discovers the actual Dalek-and-Davros plot in an info-dump from his fellow prisoners, confronts Davros and then…is responsible for none of the resolution of the story, except a brief lesson in botany, which could revolutionise the future of Necros. When you think about it, Kara employs Orcini and Bostock to kill Davros, while aiming to destroy them too by a bomb in their communicator. Almost everybody ends up dead, and the Doctor can save none of them, it’s Lilt and Takis who eventually call in the ‘Supreme’s Daleks’ to come and destroy Davros’ new recruits and take him back to Skaro – notably, the Daleks don’t level the planet on their way out, they just take their creator and swan off back to the stars – and Orcini eventually blows himself and Davros’ new Daleks to death. It’s a little grim that Lilt and Takis, the thugs-turned-funeral-directors, get to survive, and the Doctor’s lesson about the weed plant producing protein reveals to the Necrosians what we learned in Episode 1 – that the Great Healer’s eradication of famine in this corner of the cosmos needn’t end with him being rooted out and carted off – protein is abundant on Necros in a vegetable form, so they needn’t have been eating their processed relatives all this time.

In a Doctor Who story in which neither the Doctor nor his companion get to actually do much of any relevance, it’s mind-blowing how much Saward packs into the story, how many threads intertwine and how dark and cynical the key Davros plot is, underneath it all – harvesting human brains (or indeed heads) and turning them into Daleks, while feeding the rest of their bodies (and those of the less intellectually endowed) to the populace as concentrated protein. The darkness of that plot, swirled around as it is by violent, lecherous and desperate funeral directors, corporate leaders determined to bite the hand that feeds them, assassins looking for the redemption of their lost honour, ubiquitous Daleks, and bickering bodysnatchers, is rendered hypnotically on screen by Graeme Harper, and ultimately it delivers what is many people’s favourite Colin Baker story, its unique visual style and the spot-on musical sizzles lifting a plot where no-one is remotely pleasant or telling the truth into a hallmark of the Baker era. Certainly in the way it’s presented, it’s a defining moment of that era – the Stengos glass Dalek that feels its mind succumbing to Dalek conditioning and then begs and screams for death is iconic of the harder, more gruesome tone the Colin Baker era espoused (after bleeding Cyber-converts, tortured Varosians, the Doctor quipping at people in acid baths, and the personal poisoning of an Androgum by this morally crusading Doctor comes this story in which Saward, as he did in Resurrection of the Daleks and Attack of the Cybermen, raises the game of the villains of the Doctor Who world, making them seem more real and dangerous by turning up the body-count). It shows the body-horror of Dalek-conversion, just as Attack of the Cybermen shows Cyber-conversion, in a visceral way that had never been seen before, and the sense it leaves with the reader is that the universe is not only more real and dangerous than we’d ever previously imagined, but that ordinary people – business people, grieving people, even people there to provide us a service at our most vulnerable, like funeral directors, can be dark, deceitful, bullying and complex, so if our Doctor is harder and more voluble than we’ve been used to, he still stands for one of those unusual absolutes of goodness in a universe that’s out to get us.

Revelation of the Daleks, even today, can be a shocking watch. The pure venality that runs through its characters’ veins can make it a hard, exhausting, depressing watch. But it’s also a gripping watch that you can rarely turn away from once you’ve started, because the maelstrom of evil, from the petty, like Jobel, to the greedy, like Kara, to the utterly corrupting, like Davros in his lair, just grows and grows and swallows you up, leaving you at the end feeling like you’ve just spent an hour and half on an epic adventure with real people, but also, strangely, enormously glad it’s over and you made it out alive.