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 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.

Reviews Torchwood: Dissected by Tony J Fyler

Tony picks apart a meeting of two favourites.

Hoorah, hooray, Martha Jones returns to the world of Torchwood!

That’s the capsule review out of the way. Now let’s go a little deeper.

Martha Jones – London-raised medical student, universal time traveller, one-time lovesick puppy and rebound reject, since then getting her life well and truly back on track, first with assignments at Torchwood and then with UNIT – has always needed a bit of explanation in terms of her relationship with Gwen Cooper, Valleys copper turned gun-toting world defender and one of Torchwood’s finest. On the surface, it feels like they’d have little in common, but on screen, they developed an interesting chemistry, a friendship born of the experience of modern women doing things that, even a generation ago, would have raised the eyebrows of a disapproving patriarchy, saving the world themselves, rather than being saved. Using their brains and their nous (and in Gwen’s case, free from the pacifist expectations of the Doctor, occasionally a big world-buggering gun) to get by in different organizations with different cultures and ways of doing things.

Those differences are crucial in Torchwood – Dissected. In fact they’re our starting point for the drama. At the end of a very long day of bodies and post-mortems, with her surprise leaving party being planned for half an hour or so from now, Martha Jones opens the door to a UNIT base and finds Gwen Cooper of Torchwood on her doorstep, with a body in the back of her car.

Never let it be said that Valleys girls ever turn up empty handed to a party.

Gwen has a corpse that doesn’t feel right, somehow, and she needs Martha to give it the once-over before she can let it lie. As you’d suspect of Gwen and Torchwood, that’s mostly true and partly a blatant falsehood. As you’d expect of Martha, she knows as much and lulls Gwen into a false sense of security.

The relationship between the two is initially quite spiky and frosty, and it only really thaws out once the two have faced a particular peril together. Much of the episode re-introduces us to the two and how they work together, but adds a new dimension of Martha’s dissatisfaction with the life of a UNIT operative, schlepping around the world, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, but yet inherently fairly scornful of the occasional shoot-first-reanimate-the-corpse-ask-questions-later style of Torchwood. Even in this release, Gwen has a scanner the use of which Martha has to explain to her, because Gwen has just grabbed it and gone without performing the necessary calibrations.

In particular in this episode, they face the consequences of a dead body that seems decidedly eager to please. While not being entirely as grim as that sounds, it is at least 90% as grim as it sounds, and if you’re not a fan of mouths full of maggots…well, consider this your trigger warning before you go in, cos yaaaargh!

While the main thread of the story is a kind of Mr and Mrs Smith style dance of who trusts whom first, why and how, especially when you have a body that may not be a body and the words ‘chameleon tech’ in your ear from early on, there’s a point where the two, for all their differences of approach and intention, come back together after quite a while, seeming slights explained, seeming manipulations overcome, and you begin to see how cool the world of Jones and Cooper could be – imagine these two on the run together, or setting up a private world-saving agency with the best of Torchwood’s instincts and the best of UNIT’s methods working in harmony, and something deep in your brain screams ‘Shut up and take my money! No, no, all of it! Take it now!’

We may be a little way from quite that dream scenario, but by the end of this story, Martha’s future, which seemed unfocused at the start as she prepared to leave UNIT, has many new opportunities, and some of those certainly include more work alongside Gwen or other Torchwood members. Her future might not be full-on Torchwood-based yet – Martha actually has more of an above-board core in her way of operating than perhaps would fit with the day-to-day, job-done-at-all-costs ethos of Jack Harkness’ Torchwood. This is the woman who toppled the victorious Master not with a clever gun, after all, but with an inspiring story, a vision of hope, of brightness, of salvation based on positive energy, rather than with a bullet to the head. First, do no harm, the Hippocratic oath of healers is keen to remind her, somewhat in conflict with the Torchwood way. But through the battles of this story, both with Gwen and with the body that may or may not be a body (though if we’re honest, the idea of it being just a body never really flies. This is Torchwood, after all), Martha gains a degree of new perspective on herself, on the world, on the threats that challenge it and on the ways by which they can be fought. There’s an opportunity here for Martha to discover or rediscover herself for a new stage in her development. Just as travelling with the Doctor initially opened her eyes to a universe of possibilities and showed her she was second best to nobody, saving the world in her own signature style, so Dissected, while a much tighter, inherently smaller voyage of discovery, sets Martha’s uncertain, somewhat disillusioned feet at a new crossroads. We all know where we hope she chooses to go from here, but a straight jump to full-on Torchwood might not only be tricky in terms of that tattered flag we call canon, but also might not be the right move for Martha – at least not yet. If it happens to take a fairly long run of one-off releases to pull Martha more and more into the Torchwood orbit…it’s probably fair to say that Torchwood fans everywhere would be entirely delighted to hear them. Then, once Gwen eventually leaves Torchwood, maybe there’d be room for that private oddness-investigating business in that continuity-window. Jones and Cooper: The Correctors…

Bottom line, what Tim Foley’s delivered in Torchwood - Dissected is an hour of mostly character-based drama, allowing for two very different people with some distance and some grudge between them to find a way back to what they like and enjoy in each other, in spite of their divergent strategies. Gwen learns from Martha’s new, grown-up, UNIT-appropriate and methodical approach, Martha remembers the power of doing things the instinctive, intuitive Torchwood way. At the end of the story, the two women have reminded themselves and each other that in many ways, they’re each better than the sum of their organizational approaches – and that’s a reminder that’ll have you punching the air and begging for more.

Reviews Night of the Fendahl by Tony J Fyler

Tony talks evil, real and imaginary.

What does ‘evil’ mean?

For the first of a run of Torchwood stories using old Doctor Who villains, new range writer Tim Foley lands the Fendahl, a composite creature from the darker end of Tom Baker’s Tardis time, composed of several Fendahleen (rather touchingly and accurately described in this story as ‘Worms of Death’) and a core, usually a human being – indeed, usually a woman. The Fendahl rarely if ever pulls its punches – it’s evil, it’s ultimate, it brings death, game over.

But with the freedom to open up the idea to a more adult interpretation here, Tim Foley genuinely asks the question: what does ‘evil’ mean? Is the Fendahl making choices, or acting on the instincts it has that things need to die simply because of its existence? Is that evil? And if not, then what is?

Director Scott Handcock tweeted when this story was released that it was ‘honestly, the darkest thing I’ve ever worked on.’

He’s not wrong, because the story explores the difference between grand, cosmic, ego-driven ‘evil,’ all inescapable and huge and universe-ending, and real, human, rarely-even-making-headlines evil, of a kind that’s going on out there in our world today. It slams ‘Doctor Who Evil’ up against ‘Real Evil,’ and the result is disturbing in the extreme. If this one doesn’t make you shudder, you might want to check your nervous system.

In terms of the Fendahl, there’s a degree to which the original story is re-played – we’re back at Fetch Priory, and budget movie entrepreneur Marco (played with a deep, brusque vein of hating everyone by Gerald Tyler) is at the house to create, it seems, the climax to a deeply unpleasant film, based around the events of the original Fetch Priory horror. Based loosely, to be sure, and Marco has what he feels is a larger agenda, but that’s the set-up of the piece. Derek, the director of Marco’s movies, is a more down-to-earth scumbag, and Gavin Swift gives him a combination of unctuousness and viciousness that is horribly, horribly believable. Ged the techie, played by regular Big Finish writer Guy Adams, gives the misogyny in the room its most businesslike, semi-professional feel.

And then there’s Phil. Phil the actor, who sports a jockstrap and wields a prop sacrificial dagger as a priest of death.

Wait…it is a prop…isn’t it?

In among this crew of vastly, viciously, believably unpleasant men, there needs to be one woman. The victim.

‘The Scientist’ who re-enacts the events at Fetch Priory, giving over control of her body and what happens to it to the men in the room.

Gwen Cooper.

Because whether the men know it or not, what’s going on at Fetch Priory is more than a re-enactment for a film. The Fendahl is returning, entirely for its own purposes, its own grandiose, hungry understanding of ‘evil’ – but here, the Fendahl actually acts as something of an avenging angel, because here, there’s a darker, more insidious evil at work. The evil of men against women, for the pleasure of men, going beyond the lines of exploitation-porn, though that’s the baseline on which this story’s deeper darkness connects with the everyday, unseen, unscourged reality of far too many girls and women. Rooms full of men, with one, or two or however-many women in them, where consent might be ‘agreed’ but is never real, never given without a twist of coercion or a thrust of violence. Rooms beyond the agreed transactional consent of legitimate porn sets, where performers and their comfort are valued. Rooms where exploitation is the point.

Here, because this is Torchwood – the people who brought you Countrycide, remember – the line is pushed even further back, the gulf of human horror shown to be even deeper and darker than coercion, violence and rape, to the extent that the whole ‘Return of the Fendahl’ element feels almost like light relief by comparison. Worms of Death? No bother, because they exist in the mindscape of the grand guignol, of over-the-top spectacular movie horror.

Real horror is in the mundanity of the men who come to Fetch Priority to finish their movie, an anthology piece that’s seen lots of blondes go in front of the camera before Gwen Cooper steps into the limelight. Real evil is in that mundanity too, and it’s a point made all the more potent by the character of Phil, searching for ways to help Gwen out, then searching instead for justifications for what he’s about to do to her, in the ‘obviousness’ of her bad motherhood, in the fact that she’s there at all.

As for what happens to the men in this story – there’s a connection to the original Fendahl story, certainly, but there are also levels of justice at work, and there’s even a callback to Doctor Who story Boom Town, in the philosophy of a change of heart, and whether it’s enough. Whether it can ever be enough.

Be advised – Night of the Fendahl is deeply dark, and if you have history of being compromised or overpowered or feeling prey to men and the conditions they engineer, consider this a trigger warning, because you’re in for a hard listen. It probably only works within Torchwood’s hard-edged, grown-up, looking-things-in-the-face remit, and certainly you could never do this in Doctor Who – it’d be inherently too dark for that audience. Within the Torchwood remit though, while it still pushes the envelope, it’s a brilliantly constructed piece of drama, using one of the most overtly black-and-white monsters of the horror era of Doctor Who as a spirit of both vengeance and justice against the real horrors of evil men who are everywhere, right now as you read this, in rooms where women are terrorised for profit, for porn, for the pain they can feel for the pleasure of others.

Eve Myles of course, we know from long experience, has brilliance in her, and frequently deploys it in her Torchwood career. Her journey in this story will remind you all over again of just how breathtaking she can be, as she takes Gwen from being an almost sleepwalking, accepting victim, through Seventies-style eldritch horror, to the real power of Gwen Cooper and the sense of natural justice at the end of the piece. Particularly in scenes with Phil (played with a lightness of touch that allows him a real journey of his own by Bradley Freegard), she delivers a Gwen here that stands in stark contrast to all the scumbags in the room – a fully-rounded person to whom they are willing that very bad things should happen, but who shows them the shame of themselves by the end of the night.

Take a deep, deep breath before you play Night of the Fendahl. But play it. The fact that it will disturb you so much is a mark of quite how brilliant it is in its writing, editing, playing and direction. The fact that it goes as far as it does, and then balances on the knife-edge of darkness and justice, puts it up there with Countrycide, but stops it falling off into the territory of exploitation and gives it a point beyond its pretty high shock value. You might not replay Night of the Fendahl for a while once you’ve heard it – but we can guarantee you won’t stop thinking about it for a week at least.