Big Finish Reviews+ Entanglement by Tony J Fyler

Tony gets entangled in a game of who’s who.

Guy Burgess and Kim Philby are infamous names in British history (Google is your friend).

Here, writers Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky take us back to the pre-infamy days as students at Cambridge for a First Doctor story that has the feel of a pure historical with just a dash or two of Something Very Odd Going On, and a heaping tablespoon of alien judgment on the human race.

Entanglement is a proper, absurd, anything goes First Doctor story, with the Doctor and friends separated from the Tardis while on a Cambridge college campus just a couple of years before World War II.

There’s something altogether irresistible about bringing the Doctor to Cambridge. In many ways, it feels like exactly the sort of place to which several incarnations might have retired, the First among them. A Cambridge college is almost, to this 21^st century day, a world in and of itself – in fact, you could even go so far as to say it’s like a mini-Gallifrey, a place of quiet, patient study, with a wild flood of youth undermining everything it stands for as they grow to understand what it is, and then become a part of it themselves.

Anything could happen in a Cambridge college.

Here in Sedgwick College, there is random deadly aggression which dissipates like a storm. There’s a camera that really isn’t from around here. There’s a suspiciously missing Master of the College, Sir Isiah Hardy, and a peculiar inability among everybody else to remember how long he’s been gone. There are a pair of Proctors who make almost comically little effort to disguise the fact that they’re not from round here either. And there’s a contest. A contest to see who, in the continuing absence of Sir Isiah, who will become the new Master of Sedgwick – the sharp, driven Professor Lewis, played by Philip fox, or the woolly, forgetful don, Professor Woolf, played by Richard Braine.

The opening sequence puts the Tardis irritatingly out of reach, meaning the crew have to go about finding ways to get it retrieved. That means mixing with the locals, and it’s not long before both Vicki and Steven are reporting unusual goings-on, but this Doctor, seemingly willing to take the universe at face value, tells them they’re talking nonsense, and goes off, in the guise of a visiting professor from King’s Lynn, to teach a class full of undergraduates.

That…doesn’t go as well as he expects, and the Doctor joins them in their suspicions.

The odd thing about Entanglement, and one that makes it agreeable, is that while its most natural TV comparison would be with Shada, it actually has the feel of a pure historical for much of the running time – there are mysteries aplenty along the way, but it’s not until quite late in the day that we learn of the researches in which Sir Isiah was engaged, and things start to get altogether more ‘aliens out to destroy the planet’ than ‘The Doctor and friends do Cambridge.’

There is one scene that will stick in your mind though – and in the age of #MeToo and the fightback against male violence aimed at women and girls, it will leave a tinny, unpleasant taste in your mouth. Because whatever is making Cambridge undergraduates into rampaging mobs whose only wish is to tear each other apart also effects Steven and Vicki. It remains to be heard whether Vicki can see Steven in the same way she saw him before this adventure, but be aware, there’s a moment here that will tighten your chest if you’ve ever been vulnerable. Episode 1 cliffhanger, should you need a marker.

As the contest to become the next Master of Sedgwick goes on, the Doctor throws in his lot with one of the pretenders to the crown for reasons of his own, and Guy and Kim are ready to stoke the student body to his cause.

Then, in case you didn’t have enough to process already, things get weirder still when ‘the entanglement machine’ – a nice touch of the Sixties basic-as-all-get-out style of technobabble – is revealed, its power activated, and Sir Isiah discovered, at least by one of the Tardis team.

That’s perhaps the oddest thing about this story – it’s built of a large number of peculiar elements, (one thing you can always guarantee of a Khan and Salinsky script is it’ll never be short of elements! This script, for the initiated, is also crammed to bursting point with references to the Alice adventures by Lewis Carrol) and sees Steven, Vicki and the Doctor each take a storytelling strand, with two rival professors, two dodgy proctors, two Cambridge students, two space MacGuffins, one stranded Tardis and a field of intense vi-o-lennnnnce – and yet it flows for the most part with the energy of a pure historical, the Doctor and friends getting involved in things which no doubt shouldn’t concern them, riiiiight up to the point where aliens want to destroy the world.

The ending is a game of find-the-villain, with contender after contender seeming to fit the bill until, right at the crisis point, the Tardis itself comes to the rescue, and Something Clever traps all the potential villains together, the latest in a series of First Doctor actions that have Steven and Vicki questioning the ethics of his choices.

Entanglement is a story of a kind which was rarely told back in the First Doctor’s time, but which this particular Tardis team would be familiar with – alien interlopers hiding in deep cover and preparing to Do Something Dreadful to the Earth. It has something of the feel of The Time Meddler, in that it spends a while establishing the normality of its world, and then pulls reveal after reveal that shows things are not by any means normal here and need to be stopped.

More than anything, Entanglement is an alien historical romp in a Cambridge college with something interesting to say about the state of humanity, which flies by in very agreeable bites as element after element is revealed. Brace yourself for the Episode 1 cliff-hanger, and Entanglement is a wild pre-war ride among the Cambridge cloisters.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Churchill Years, Volume Two by Tony J Fyler

  

Tony gives Churchill a V-sign.

Full disclosure time. Before Volume 1 of The Churchill Years was released, I was not a fan of the idea of using him as an anchor for a whole spin-off series. Ian McNeice’s Churchill on screen had been one of only a few highlights of Victory of the Daleks but turning him into the anchor for a series of Doctor-adjacent stories felt like stretching his capabilities as a character within the world of Doctor Who beyond the point of diminishing returns.

Then the first volume came out, and I was utterly, utterly wrong. Doesn’t happen often, but there you go, let’s never speak of it again.

So with Volume 2, what we have is a much stronger sense of instinctive reliability on approach to the box set – but does it deliver?

Yes it does, but just slightly less than the first set.

This collection of tales focuses for three of its four stories on Churchill’s war years, and brings two Ninth Doctor stories, one Tenth and one Eleventh to the party. Oh and Madam Vastra. Churchill and Vastra, side by side – that’s got to be worth the price of admission, no?

Paul Morris kicks us off with Young Winston, a tale of magic jewels, historical legends, and the volatile background of Cuba. Set in 1985 and 1899, it follows Churchill on a trip to Cuba to get a taste of war, and then, as he begins to make his parliamentary way in the world, the ghosts of hot-blooded nations and people surface in his life.

It’s a story that bristles with star power and crossover potential, with Churchill and Vastra swapping narration duties in the different tones of the Churchill Diaries and the Chronicles of the Great Detective (Now that’s an audio spin-off we’d pay good money for), but it delivers far more than a star pairing and a jewelled MacGuffin – there’s an enormous well of tenderness in the story of the young Winston (Iain Batchelor) and his mysterious Cuban friend Carmen, played with sensitivity by the gloriously-named Melody Grove, and it leaves you wanting more crossover stories between the Paternoster Gang and the future Prime Minister. Churchill and Strax for box set 3, anyone?

Human Conflict by Iain McLaughlin is a story that highlights, in a way similar to but harsher than Victory of the Daleks, the dichotomy between Churchill’s drive to win total war at any cost and his friendship with the Doctor. It’s harsher because this is a story in which the Doctor with the big ears and the leather jacket is advisor, judge, jury and rescuer as Churchill explores the potential of alien weaponry in the early years of the war.

Advised not to get involved in an arms deal that could potentially win the Allies the war, Churchill, like Harriet Jones in later years, goes against the wishes of his taciturn Time Lord friend, leading to a solid story of derring-do, stand-offs, a terrible price, and perhaps most remarkably of all, a portrayal of Churchill from McNeice that shows why, even with his war-hawk intuitions, Churchill was a man inherently good enough to earn the Doctor’s friendship. It’s moderately romanticised stuff of course, but the Churchill of Doctor Who has never been the Churchill of real life. Nevertheless, Human Conflict brings good performances to the fore, especially from Bethan Walker as Bragnar, and feels like a Sunday afternoon black and white war movie, only Doctor Whoed up.

I Was Churchill’s Double, by Alan Barnes, romps home with this box set’s ‘complicate the living bejesus out of a plotline’ prize. Into what sounds like it should be a straightforward tale of deception, doubles and associated tomfoolery, Barnes brings fairy tales, parallel dimensions, self-hypnosis through a howlaround TV interference pattern (a lovely touch, that), secret plans, two Churchills, John Logie Baird, undercover Nazis and a whole lot more. Oh, and the Ninth Doctor again, popping up having lost his Tardis somewhere. It’s a storyline you don’t want to try and follow while, for instance, operating heavy machinery, because you won’t stand a chance of working out what’s going on. You won’t if you give it your full attention either, but it will unfold for you better if you dedicate your lugholes to it for the space of an hour. McNeice is on top form in this story – which is just as well, given its double dose of Churchill – and he gets to slightly vary his performance to differentiate between the two. Compelling stuff, but you might like to have a cup of tea and a biscuit ready at the end, so as to untwist your brain.

Churchill Victorious shows us the man who led the British war on the day of its effective completion – with London, with the whole country celebrating on what rations it can scrape together, Churchill feels himself alone, and under faintly ridiculous Dad’s Army cover, he goes out looking for, if not trouble, then at least an honest communion with his people. Naturally of course, he runs into power cuts, a populace less grateful than he might have expected, an alien aggressor and a prisoner with familiar puppydog enthusiasm and demented hair. Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky are rarely writers to rush to their point, but here they give us a story that’s seemingly innocuous but eventually builds to a test of Churchill’s soul – how far will he go to ensure his personal victory, his legacy, his immortality among the British people?

There’s a line of balance to be drawn with Churchill – on the one hand you don’t want to overstud his life and career with incidents with the Doctor. For those who like him in the real world, it could potentially take away from the man’s own greatness. For those who don’t, it could feel like the Doctor’s trust was misplaced. And the ending of the second box set, coinciding with the end of the war, could work as the moment to fade out on Churchill. But there’s no real reason why it has to – McNeice is clearly in great form, and Churchill’s life was long and studded with real incidents which lend themselves to a Doctor Who treatment. On the strength of this box set and its predecessor, a third set would be no hardship at all, and with the dramatic returns showing only faint signs of diminishing so far, there’s no reason why Churchill himself shouldn’t KBO for a while yet at Big Finish.

Big Finish Reviews+ Kingdom of Lies by Tony J Fyler

‘Up the Republic!’ says Tony.

Kingdom of Lies is a comedy of royalty and vanity, with occasional assassins, very occasional mishaps and more than a handful of references to British royal shenanigans over the last few decades.

A duke and a duchess, not long married and realising they hate each other, have divided the city of Cardenas right down the middle, with a blue zone and a red zone, and an enormously precise line that must not ever ever ever be crossed on pain of dungeon-wallowing and possibly death. They conduct a PR war to each appear the more wounded, the more compassionate, in order to win the love of the people, as a way of sticking it to each other, and potentially manoeuvring to a position of practical power over each other, the duke determined to keep his duchess’ dowry, the duchess intending to one day become the sole ruler of the duchy. They’re both, when it comes down to it, the kind of people you’d stab yourself in the leg with forks rather than spend any real time with.

And then the Fifth Doctor’s full Tardisload arrive, and are easily divided by virtue of where they happen to be standing, half the team going to the duke’s dungeons, the other half to the duchess’.

It’s a story premise you’d expect from the Graham Williams/Douglas Adams era of Who, which rather proves how dedicated a performer Tom Baker actually was in selling their premises, because it doesn’t quite work with Peter Davison’s gang. There’s a degree of solid comedy from this particular Doctor being mistaken for an elusive assassin, and Sarah Sutton gives it her best pantomime effort as Nyssa, his deadly assistant – ‘He murders for money, I kill because I like it!’ – but a little too much of the story’s wiring is left on show for it to be truly immersive: the Doctor and Nyssa are ‘assassins’ brought in to kill the duchess, while Tegan and Adric are security consultants who can help the duchess defeat the assassins hired by her husband, and round and round and round we go, powered mostly by satire and the need to Do Stuff.

It’s not by any means a bad story, Kingdom of Lies – it’ll keep you entertained for a couple of hours, and if you like enclosed stories with stakes that are both high and a tiiiiny bit Moffatty (in that nobody who seems to be dead should necessarily be presumed dead, ever. Or, in fact, presumed to be what they seem), you’ll have enough fun with Kingdom of Lies to listen to it again a little while. If you happen to give a fig about, for instance, the heartache of the Charles and Diana years of British history, you might well find Something About Which You Can Be Offended, because writers Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky take a ruthlessly ‘plague on both your houses’ approach to skewering royal vanity, with allusions which feel obvious enough to punch, but as long as you don’t give the aforementioned fig, there’s fun to be had with, for instance, the duchess demanding her transport be crashed, so she can stumble bloodied from the wreckage into the glare of sympathetic publicity, and blame the pilot.

In a dislocation from any sense of reality, things get rather more fun again when the in-laws turn up – with the duchess’ dad (played with good bluster and imaginary bushy moustache by Tim Bentinck) declaring war on the duchy, and then nipping off to put a bet on the result. Richenda Carey, as Duchess Miranda’s mother, is a bonus to the production, adding energy and a sense of matriarchal power to proceedings. It’s fair to say though that things start to flag by the time the assassin the Doctor’s been pretending to be arrives in person, and it’s less than helpful that they’re played by Patsy Kensit, who fits neatly in a long line of actresses who turn in stolid performances and say the lines they’re given, despite clearly having very little idea what they’re doing – Beryl Reid and Joan Sims, we salute you.

Overall, Kingdom of Lies is a fluffy bit of royal fun that does very little harm and entertains for its running time. Will it change your life or push you to new depths of appreciation for what Doctor Who on audio can do? No, but then it’s not really trying to do that. It’s entertaining and fun and when it tries to make a deeper point about people who attach themselves to people in power to advance their own position by stoking conflict, it largely succeeds – no mean feat, because that’s a message that could easily have been lost in the spinning together of strands as the story comes to its conclusion.

Spend a vacation in the Kingdom of Lies – you’ll have a laugh, and then get on with your day.