Big Finish Reviews+ Avalon, Volume 1 by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s resistant. 

Expanded universes are all the rage in cult TV and movies. 

They’re what Marvel’s been up to for a while now, conquering the world with new adventures for characters inhabiting the same fictional universe as its major movie players. The Star Wars expanded universe is, let’s face it, significantly more gripping than the last few episodes of the main movie franchise were. 

Big Finish is already a past master at expanded universe content. Everything from Jago and Litefoot to the Paternoster Gang, the Adventures of Jenny, and River Song, and Lady Christina, Gallifrey, the War Master, Missy, and even UNIT, it all expands the main parent-universe of Doctor Who. 

We mention this because some people have raised their eyebrow at the launch of Avalon, Volume 1, and questioned whether it was either wanted or needed. Big Finish is expanding the universe of Blake’s 7 now? 

Well…erm…yes. Yes, that’s precisely what it’s doing. And there are sound in-universe and ex-universe reasons for doing it. 

In the real world, it’s sad but true that to keep running Blake’s 7 full-cast adventures when the actors who gave us Blake, Avon and Servalan are no longer with us becomes ever-increasingly difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. 

Meanwhile, in the world of Blake’s 7, the viability of this expanded universe was set up by the show itself – Blake was relatively frequently tripping over ‘other rebel leaders’ and ‘other resistance cells.’ And the thing very few people ever talk about is quite how exceptional the Liberator crew were – they had the fastest ship in the sector, they had the ability to instantly teleport down to a remote location (and back up again), and they had Orac, the ultimate computer hacker’s toolkit. For all they got into scrapes and scraps along the way, the Liberator crew had it relatively easy when it came to resistance fighting. The fictional universe has plenty of space for those other resistance groups that didn’t have anywhere near as comfortable a time fighting the power of the Federation. 

So – Avalon. Avalon was a resistance leader in the TV version of Blake’s 7, and has subsequently appeared in a Big Finish continuation of her story. More to the point, she is a relatively strong starting point for the expanded universe of Blake’s 7. 

In this first box set of three stories, there are all the hallmarks of that expansion – we don’t get an Avalon origin story as such, but the first story, Terra Firma, by Steve Lyons, bristles with Blakeness, as it’s set during the time of the first episode of Blake’s 7. We hear mention of his trial on child sex offences, we deal at length with the issue of the resistance group meeting he attended where, betrayed by undercover Federation agent Dev Tarrant, the group was massacred, and in fact Tarrant features prominently in this set, with Malcolm James slipping back into the slimy shoes of TV Tarrant, Jeremy Wilkin. 

Olivia Poulet returns to the world of Blake’s 7 as Avalon too, so in terms of continuity with prior Big Finish toe-dips into this resistance fighter’s life, as well as tying the series in with original Blake’s 7 chronology, this set has done its homework and is here to deliver.  To tie everything together, Terra Firma gives us the story of the first encounter between Avalon and Jenna Stannis, later of the Liberator, as mentioned on-screen. 

It’s perhaps not a legendary tale, Terra Firma, but it never stops making sense – in the wake of the resistance massacre and the trial of Blake, Avalon, who’s been working her revolutionary magic on other planets within the Federation, is driven to come home to Earth, if for no other reason than to prove to both the Federation and the people that the resistance is still alive there. She teams up with an old friend who’s not quite old enough to be old yet, Fay (played young by Becky Wright), and the two tangle with a smuggler who – much to Avalon’s dismay - is getting a name for herself. Jenna (Sally Knyvette) is very much at a pre-Blake stage here, increasingly aware she wants to follow someone into battle against the Federation, but that she has some pretty high standards for what they need to be able to achieve. By the end of the episode, Jenna’s decided that Avalon’s not it – at least, not yet – and headed off to her destiny. Fay gets an interesting introduction and we’re never entirely sure what the relationship between her and Avalon is, whether they’re related or simply sisters in the resistance. Certainly though, Fay looks up to Avalon in this first story, and is breathlessly eager to please and impress her leader. 

Much of the plot of Steve Lyons’ story is workaday Federation grimness, but in a way, that’s the point – away from the Liberator, there’s a lot of workaday Federation grimness - including here a feud between ex-con Krask (Nicholas Asbury playing a role that back in the Eighties would have pretty much belonged to Stephen Yardley or Michael Attwell by right), and Federation goon-with-attitude Gryson (played with toe-curling officiousness by William Ellis). It all serves the bigger point of Avalon’s return, her re-uniting with Fay, and her testing out of Jenna Stannis as a potential resistance fighter. It’s a useful place to start this reimagining of the Avalon backstory, and having a member of the Blake crew there to bolster the connection between Blake’s universe and Avalon’s is a clever idea that helps us get to grips with the parameters of this new series quickly. 

What’s a little odd about the second story in the set, Throwback, by Gary Russell, is that Avalon’s barely in it. 

Sure, she’s a prime mover of the story, but really, this is an origin story for a new member of Avalon’s crew, super-civilized dome-dweller, Argo Madison. 

Madison, played by Cliff Chapman, has quite a backstory – his parents should, according to all the social pressures in the Federation, have aborted him, but they refused. Madison grew up fussy, clever, always in need of the status quo – and with a prodigious memory. His work as a data clerk was both inevitable and also strangely necessary to him, setting his world in order. 

When Avalon and her crew come to blow up his corner of the records archive, it ruins a lot of his life. 

Being interrogated by a man named Travis doesn’t exactly brighten up his life either. But what that gives you is a tight mostly three-handed episode of torture and memories, as Travis (Stephen Greif) and Madison (Chapman) trade words, memories, and probing questions, with occasional input from Travis’ helper, Dag (Dawn Murphy). It’s soon apparent that Madison has an ulterior motive and a mission of his own, but which will be able to out-think the other – Travis or Madison? 

If you want a mood, think Clarice Starling meets Hannibal Lecter for the first time – if Starling were strapped to a pain-inducing lie detector, and Lecter were in control of the dials. It takes a fair amount of gumption to play a scene like that with an actor of Greif’s calibre and vocal quality, but to give him his due, Chapman more than holds his own, making the story a subtle battle of wills and words and making us invest in Madison’s future, despite the fact that as a character, he’s difficult to warm to – a fact not lost on his fellow resistance members as time goes on.

Not to set episodes against each other, but it’s quite possible Throwback takes the laurels of this set, simply for the intensity of the truth-or-torture setting, and pitting Greif and Chapman against each other produces something powerful, the kind of audio you can eat a hell of a lot of popcorn to. And probably a few fingernails too. 

Black Water, by Trevor Baxendale, rounds off the set with a story that sees Avalon and her team plan to disrupt the hydroponics centre that supplies a lot of Alpha grades. There’s some Star One energy here – what happens to the little people when you’re busy fighting the big empire? They suffer, they might even die, as collateral damage in your war against the State. And there’s a pleasing amount of command blindness on show in Avalon’s personality in this episode, bringing the ‘greater good’ argument to bear, while preparing to hurt a lot of the ‘little people’ – however Alpha grade they are. While it’s not the first time in the set that Olivia Poulet gets the chance to stamp her voice on the role, it’s probably the episode in which she gets to do the most interesting things – including a little double-crossing, and the exposure of a traitor in her midst. 

In something of a spoiler, we can tell you that that Madison is a strong presence in this story too, and a gloriously whingy one, having been whisked out of his safe life in the dome and forced to deal with sleepless nights, unfiltered water and protein derived directly from animals. Or meat, as we 20^th century barbarians would call it. 

More though, this story shows the first strike of Avalon’s new group against the mechanics of the Federation, and brings the connection between Avalon’s group and Blake’s friends on Earth to a conclusion, as Dev Tarrant is, not to put too fine a point on it, rumbled. But is he rumbled in time to save both the group and the plan, or will Tarrant bring another resistance group to its knees? 

It’s a close-run thing and there are casualties along the way, leading Avalon, at the end of this set, to head back out into space, having made a point there on Earth, to keep the resistance fighting in the heart of the Federation. 

Just as the first story-bloc of Blake’s 7 dealt with the corrupt Federation on Earth, and was extra-specially bleak as a result, so Avalon’s first box set focuses on keeping the resistance alive at home. There’s a cogency to the set as it moves from her return home to her bolstering a new team, and then, having attempted a major strike, having to run back to the stars. The first set leaves you with a sense of something completed, and looking forward to whatever’s coming next. Olivia Poulet gets to show some of the steel and some of the compassion in Avalon’s character, as well as how – at least at the beginning – she deals with the pressure of being a known ‘legend’ in the resistance. 

The universe of Blake’s 7 is expanding. Avalon is taking up the fight. And with the likes of Stephen Greif providing a bridge between this world and the world of Blake, and the likes of Cliff Chapman and Becky Wright supporting Olivia Poulet’s confident central figure, Avalon, Volume 1 is a great way to start opening up of the Federation’s universe. The resistance is back – and it sounds brilliant. 

Big Finish Reviews+ The Robots Box Set 1 by Tony J Fyler

Please do not throw hands at me, asks Tony

Robots Of Death is one of the most elegantly designed, classically plotted Doctor Who stories ever broadcast. While in essence, it’s Agatha Christie in space – a small group of upper class people and the servants who do the real work in an enclosed environment, but then people start dying – the lightly layered context of the world in which the story is set has fascinated people ever since. Kaldor is a long-established colony that brought a concept of aristocracy with it, the ‘First Families’ akin to British lords and ladies who came over with William the Conqueror, or the descendants of American Mayflower settlers, happy in their societal privilege.

But then there are the robots.

The robots twist the historical perspective somewhat, because what they are is a permissibly kickable caste – you don’t have to be polite to a robot, any more than you do to a kettle or a cash machine. It’s a thing, a mobile personal assistant, it’s Siri on legs or Alexa with an art deco face. The robots turn the Kaldorans not into aristocrats, but into Imperial Romans, owning their own three-level slave workforce.

Here’s the thing. When Robots of Death was broadcast, it was Agatha Christie in space, yes, but it was also pure science fiction – personal robots were a dream of the future or of pure invention, like flying cars, missions to Mars and worlds interconnected instantly by webs of data.

The future is very nearly now. Mars is in our sights, flying cars have been experimented with and self-driving technologies will make them more likely, you’re reading this on a worldwide web.

And the robots are coming. So interestingly, while the Kaldorans reach back to the political reality of Imperial Rome, they also, now, are an analogue of our future. Imagine Siri did have legs and could go do your grocery shopping while you were at work. Hell, imagine Siri could go out and do your work, leaving you to wait in for a grocery store’s walking Siri to turn up with your shopping. Robots are our future, and the Kaldoran robots have never been as relevant as they are now.

Here’s the other thing.

They’re fiendishly tricky to write single stories for.

Once you’ve told the story of Robots of Death, as the Fourth Doctor predicted, it’s probably the end of that civilisation. Once the slave class can be programmed to kill their masters, you have a civilisation with a deadly secret, but what else you can do with the robots is an enormously tricky question – there’s the straight flip, as Big Finish did in Robophobia, and then there’s an evolution of the nature of both humanity and robotkind, as it did in Sons of Kaldor. But it’s actually easier, if you’re going to re-use your robots, to drill down into the civilisation that uses them and show how it deals with the ethics of their use, their existence, and very possibly their increasing evolution towards sentience and self-determination within an organic population that really doesn’t want them to have it.

Welcome to The Robots 1.

If you’ve not followed everything Big Finish puts out with the slavish loyalty of a reviewer, here’s the score. Liv Chenka (Nicola Walker) is a Kaldoran med-tech (or doctor, as we’d call them). She’s been in the Doctor’s life a while, first meeting him in his Seventh incarnation, then teaming up with his Eighth for wild adventures in time and space. During the Ravenous story arc, we returned to Kaldor and met Liv’s sister, Tula (Claire Rushbrook), who’s big in robotic development. At the end of that adventure, the Doctor and his other friend Helen Sinclair flew off, because Liv had asked for some time to re-connect with her sister, her home planet, her life. A year later, they flew back, and Liv rejoined the Tardis crew.

The Robots box sets will tell the story of that ‘missing’ year.

In this first set, we explore the ethics of robot-assisted living, focusing on three key ways they could be put to use. In Roland Moore’s Robots Of Life, Liv reconnects with some old medical friends in a robot-aided hospital where it turns out people are dying on the operating table, and there’s a very unusual SuperVoc on standby. Is it a case of robot error, and if not, who’s covering for whom, and why?

As we mentioned, the robots are a permissibly kickable caste. Medical ethics are complex enough when there are only humans involved, and if things go wrong, you can’t sue a scalpel for killing your relative. But on Kaldor, is it possible to get a scalpel to take the blame for your wrongdoing? And if it is, is that ever where the story ends?

Roland Moore takes the grey areas of medical ethics and flings them into the complex arena of culpability in a robot-assisted world, while never forgetting the human aspects of Liv’s return to Kaldor, her connection with her sister and their jerky, scratchy relationship – they’re bonded by family ties, and they do love each other and look out for one another, but also, sometimes, they want to hit each other in the face with a spade. Y’know, like real siblings the universe over.

There’s great chemistry between Liv and Tula from the word go in this story, taking forward the relationship we heard in their first story together, Escape From Kaldor. But whereas that story had to hit the dramatic beats of a one-off episode in a box set, here we’re settling in for a longer haul, so Robots Of Life touches on some longer-term issues, memories and realities for the Chenka sisters. The story blends character relationships and medical conspiracy drama with a complex underlying philosophical question that’s explored the only way it can be – by throwing humans and robots into the deep end and seeing how they all react. The results are perhaps a little surprising, but we can listen to them as the product of an entrenched robot-assisted society, a society used to its walking Siris, none of whom are sentient or equal to their human masters.

Or are they?

Robert Whitelock’s The Sentient, naturally enough given the title, delves further into this question, as we explore the idea of robot ‘children’ with some degree of self-aware sentience being developed to fill gaps in the lives of some childless people. There’s a degree of parental bonding in the process, because there’s an organic element in the prototype robokind, Vissey, taken from her lead developer, Rork (Jaye Griffiths) who builds an emotional connection to the new, potentially sentient robot-child. But there are several levels of philosophical trouble brewing. Firstly, as Liv says when she discovers the project, they’re building children with mute buttons for when they become invonvenient, or loud, or stroppy, and secondly, they’re allowing Vissey unrestrained, unprotected access to the Kaldoran equivalent of the internet, complete with message boards. More than that though, the story shows the condescension inherent in liberation from a form of bondage only at the speed and to the level comfortable for the oppressor – as Vissey evolves her understanding of the world, it far outstrips that which her creators would want her to have, and she becomes far less a child parody, far more a slave revolutionary, tapping into the inevitable dichotomy of a world which builds itself a slave and calls it their child. There are uncomfortable questions by the truckload in this story, and it’s telling that it’s Liv Chenka, who’s seen the universe with the Doctor, who takes the position that would essentially forever render the Kaldor robots no more than talking kettles – the position that the kind of AI that Vissey has, with the ability to evolve into sentience, will ultimately lead to the destruction of the human population. If you want to get uber-philosophical, there’s a lesson for us in this story – Vissey learns and evolves by interaction both with the people she meets online, and by the history of the society into which she’s being built to integrate. What she finds leads her to an individual but destructive destiny. Perhaps before we go down the robot route, we should make sure our society could only be viewed as a positive example for any intelligence discovering it fresh.

Let’s not hold our breath though, eh?

Love Me Not, by John Dorney explores the idea of robots as grief-conduits, if not grief counsellors. When someone we love dies, would it be possible – would it be acceptable – to install a robot in our home, with knowledge of their nature, their memories, even their voice? Where’s the boundary between being a conduit for human grief and replacing the missing familymember? Becoming the missing familymember?

The husband of one of the victims who died on the operating table in Robots of Life returns to work earlier than anyone expects. He’s given a very particular SuperVoc to help look after his children as he adjusts to his new reality. But as he and the SuperVoc grow closer, the walls of reality and the rawness of grief collide. Can Volar Crick (Anthony Howell) tell the difference between reality and fantasy any more? And can the Chenka sisters help him back from the brink, while investigating why his wife Jasdar (Annabelle Dowler) died in the first place?

The first Robots set does what no Kaldor robots story has had the scope to do since the Kaldor City audios by Magic Bullet Productions – it takes us down among the people and the robots of Kaldor and tackles what their co-existence looks like, and what it means; the challenges, the wonders, the everyday dramas. More than those audios though, the Robots set fits comfortably within the Doctor Who universe, and deals with the robots not so much as science fiction, but as a philosophical reality we need to address in our future. And uniquely, the Big Finish version of Kaldor has the power of Liv Chenka and her sister Tula to add human warmth, compassion and sibling bickering to the world of the Robots, which makes it an irresistible listen.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Fourth Doctor Adventures, Series 9, Vol 1 by Tony J Fyler

E-Space has never felt so real to Tony.

While it’s true that hour-for-hour, he probably hasn’t quite got there yet, the fact that Tom Baker is now on his ninth season of stories for Big Finish means it feels like he’s now been the Doctor on audio as long, if not longer, than he was on screen. Indeed, January 2020 saw him clock up eight years in the audio Tardis. And whereas by the time he travelled with the Second Romana, Adric and K9 on screen, he was increasingly irritable and keen to leave the role, on audio, he’s sounding fresher than ever, seeming to vocally jump through the challenges of leading the team, like the quixotic, grinning child-sage Time Lord he always seemed to be, over forty years ago.

Also, nine seasons in, it’s about time that he was reunited with the full Season 18 Tardis team, in the topsy-turvy universe of E-Space.

It’s more or less at this point that something clicks into place. Marc Platt has been writing inventive, demented, more or less what-the-hell Doctor Who stories for decades now. Lightbulb moment – Marc Platt comes from E-Space. If you think about it like that, his entire career makes a whole lot more sense. He’s brilliant in any universe, he’s just…not from round here.

If you need evidence of that, stick Purgatory 12 in your lugholes and give it a listen. There are lots of mad, brilliant elements in here – leaping from asteroid to asteroid, death being not so much inconvenient as irrelevant, living, learning rust, and a life-form whose idea of a good time is playing chess against Adric.

No, really. We don’t know what to tell you – E-Space is light on thrills, maybe.

Purgatory 12? Heavier on thrills – there are seemingly cannibalistic space raiders, more than happy to chow down on some juicy rump of Adric (You’re entirely welcome for that image). There’s a grumpy mega-organism driving a reincarnation cycle. There’s K9 making an actual, equal, friend. There’s a bold, brave, stupid, naïve hero, seeking a noble quest. There are…more things we’d love to tell you about, but you want to be surprised when you listen, right? You know there are mad things that end up making a deeply odd sense, it’s a Marc Platt script. Marc ‘Ghost Light, Lungbarrow, Spare Parts, Loup Garoux and more’ Platt. You can more or less take creepy, freaky, complex and at least a little bit bonkers as read.

And among the background of a desolation that never ends (you don’t get a name like Purgatory 12 without good reason), there’s an embedded emotional storyline of a crucial realignment of the relationships between the Doctor, Romana, Adric and even, to some extent, K9. It begins with Adric having a teen-strop and the Doctor abandoning him on a benighted chunk of space rock, seemingly forever.

Of course, the Doctor doesn’t really abandon him, but it’s an example of the Fourth Doctor’s sometimes cavalier approach to the people who travel with him that we initially believe he might have – he gets a message and Sarah-Jane’s out the door in less than five minutes. Leela leaves, he grins his face off and chuckles madly. Even, in due course, when Romana decides to stay in E-Space, he make only the most tokenistic of efforts to persuade her to come with him, then dumps K9 on her and naffs unceremoniously off. So, with Adric, the Fourth Doctor more or less kicks him out the Tardis door in the middle of space-nowhere, and leaves him to fend for himself, at least as far as Adric knows. That’s relatively key to the drama here – Adric’s fairly new on board the Tardis, and he and the Doctor are still working each other out. It’s arguable whether or not they ever actually managed it, especially when the Doctor regenerated and Adric’s awe of him notably diminished. But here, Adric is still a swirling mass of emotions after the death of his brother, Varsh, feeling like an eternal outsider, and bouncing off the many walls of the Tardis. Even the frequently frosty Second Romana extends an olive branch to him to stop him from leaving in this story, but the impetuous youth won’t be told or restrained, and neither will the Doctor – it’s a rather touching foreshadowing of the opening to Earthshock in that regard. It would be stretching the fact to say that by the end of this story he’s the Adric of The Keeper Of Traken, but there feels like definite development in his character over the course of Purgatory 12, not least because Adric himself is crucial to the solution of problems and the escape from a fate worse than at least a single death.

Purgatory 12 is a story that works absolutely perfectly with the Season 18 vibe, wild plot elements knotted together with odder, more tangential logic that would normally pass muster in N-Space stories. If you’re a fan of Season 18, you’ll listen to Purgatory 12 and sense a return to the odd, familiar, upside-down-with-knobs-on rules of E-Space. Tom Baker blows every door off the script, Lalla Ward brings a wonderful mix or archness and a character unbending under the power of travel, John Leeson’s K9 is particularly touching here, at first feeling inadequate and electronically anxious that he’s not performing to the Doctor’s expectations, and eventually finding a kind of computer communion with his first real friend. And Matthew Waterhouse, in the role around which Purgatory 12 revolves, delivers an Adric unfinished, an Adric young and pompous and vulnerable and independent and clever, and everything that ever made him appeal to young viewers. An Adric still as much fun as ever he was.

If the hallmark of a Marc Platt script is gloriously weird, frequently creepy, dementedly inventive elements, Jonathan Morris frequently matches pulsing forward motion and elements of humour that turn the brightness of his stories up, making them seem faster and more energetic than many others in the Big Finish library.

In Chase The Night he brings an absolute belter of an idea to the weird universe of E-Space and builds in a Full Circle-style riff on life cycles and the different ways to be alive.

The Doctor and his friends land in a rainforest at night and runs into the crew of a spaceship. A spaceship that goes around the world. On rails.

Mad enough for you yet?

The reason it makes this trip is because the sun is so powerful it will burn the crew to a crisp if they don’t. They’re literally dependent on perpetually outrunning the dawn until eventually they either die or get rescued.

Enter two Time Lords, a snotty Alzarian and a robot dog. Once revealed not to be the much yearned-for rescue team, there’s a good degree of standard-issue suspicion, irritation and downright what-the-hellery about their arrival, not least from the pilot, Dena, played with a kind of strung-out, sleepless edge of command desperation by the incomparable Jane Asher (Seriously, young people, if you’ve never seen her do drama, check out the internet, find her in something called Closing Numbers. It’ll kill you, but in a good way).  So what we have is a semi-enclosed environment with a creeping threat of sunshiney death, an old spaceship on rails, of which bits keep falling off, blowing up or going wrong (no pressure), with a pilot who’s strung out, blinkered and increasingly getting used to making stark, or even horrific decisions for the benefit of her dwindling crew.

Dwindling?

Oh, yes. Didn’t we mention that? Members of the crew keep falling sick, babbling some very specific words, and then dying. Y’know, just because life would be too dull and straightforward otherwise.

When one of the Tardis crew goes the same way, leading to a cliffhanger where they’re pronounced stone dead, things take a turn for the really desperate. But life is not only what it’s cracked up to be. Somewhere in the dark, there’s a force on which the whole future of the crew could depend. But is it a force for good or evil? Or something somewhere in between?

That’s quite a lot of trademark Morris forward motion. Oh, and the humour? It’s here in spades too, with a particular running gag just one early example, when Romana speaks as she would, being one of the cleverest life forms in the room, and everyone has to repeatedly ask for an explanation of her vocabulary, which K9, with increasing electronic embarrassment, supplies. There’s also a sweet joke with K9 mentioning that he can cross the rainforest terrain perfectly well, thank you very much, and then later having to ask in a subdued, sheepish voice for assistance with ambulation over the terrain at speed.

Chase The Night is a story that mixes quite a few elements of the televised E-Space stories together – an exhausted crew, and in particular a strung out, increasingly blinkered leader in conflict with their lieutenant from Warriors’ Gate, as here, Pilot Dena frequently crosses swords with her engineer, Terson (given that world-weary tone of steady competence under the thumb of an unstable commander by William Gaminara, himself no stranger to audio work), the inevitable decay of systems both mechanical and social from State Of Decay, and the ingenious use of unusual life cycles as both a fundamental underpinning and a major part of the solution from Full Circle. In essence, then, it couldn’t be more E-Space if it tried. But still it has an energy, a runaway train urgency that none of the televised stories managed, and of course it’s all leavened with touches of delicious tongue-in-cheek humour. And it has Jane Asher, so naturally it rules all.

As an opening act to a ninth season of Fourth Doctor stories, Part 1 is a triumph – both the scenarios, both the worlds we visit are odd in very E-Space ways, and the Season 18 team have an energy and a dynamic that’s friendly, certainly, but tinged with spikes of intellectual tension because as has been noted, in Season 18, every member of the Tardis team is a genius in their own right.

What you get here is an enthusiastic Fourth Doctor in a pair of E-Space adventures written by people who’ve thoroughly understood the dynamics of that environment and that sensibility. The Season 18 team is back, and they’re absolutely glorious.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Fourth Doctor Comic Strips, Volume 1 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s in a corner, going ‘Meeeeep.’

So no change there then.

Doctor Who has, for longer than very many TV shows, embraced the idea of a multi-media existence. From the William Hartnell era, as well as the TV show and a couple of glorious, demented technicolour big screen movies, Doctor Who existed in Target novelisations (Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks landed in 1964), and it also existed in comic strip form – both in an every-year annual, and in publications like TV Comic and Countdown (later known as TV Action).

With the arrival in 1979 of Doctor Who Weekly, then Monthly, then Magazine, comic strips became a great additional way to check in with the Doctor’s adventures. They were a primitive Easter egg – extra adventures that casual viewers would never know had happened. And there have been several golden ages of comic strip adventures, with developments in the New Who era, with, for instance IDW and then Titan Comics publishing ridiculously high quality New Who adventures, with their own companions, arcs, loops, multi-Doctor stories – you name it, they’ve done it, all alongside the Doctor Who Magazine stories.

When Doctor Who Weekly launched in 1979, one of those golden comic strip ages came with it, when Pat Mills, John Wagner and artist Dave Gibbons set about delivering arresting stories, unparalleled statement-panel visuals and a sense of oomph that mirrored the likes of The City of Death on TV.

Now some of the first comic strips to feature in Doctor Who Weekly have been transformed into audio adventures from Big Finish, adapted from the originals, written by Pat Mills and John Wagner, by Alan Barnes. The first set includes The Iron Legion and The Star Beast – two stories with entirely different approaches to hooking fans, but which are both in their own way hugely well-regarded by those who read them when they first came out. The question is whether they work as audio experiences, forty years on from their original publication.

The first thing to say is these are not Doctor Who stories as you know Doctor Who stories. They’re not really the same as the Fourth Doctor’s TV output, even in the uniquely fun Season 17, and they’re also significantly different from the original Big Finish Fourth Doctor stories. These comic strip adaptations should be seen as existing in a slightly different universe of Who. They’re Who, written for children in 1979 to read for themselves, translated into audio with their bouncy, infectious, slightly sillier-than-usual Fourth Doctor intact. If you really want a modern comparison, have a listen to the Baker’s End series written by Paul Magrs and released by Bafflegab for something as bouncy and demented as these stories. But beyond that, there’s a logic in delivering these stories on audio. In the late seventies, one of the easiest and most convenient ways of stepping outside the restrictions of a BBC budget was to write and ink comic strips. Nowadays, the same effect of a bigger, more believable universe can be delivered in audio adventures, so the sense of translating the one into the other is undeniable.

Let’s get something straight here – The Iron Legion blew our tiny little Who-loving minds when it appeared in 1979. The sheer scale of it, the sweep and scope was like nothing that could have been afforded on screen. Because The Iron Legion is essentially the story of a future Roman Empire, with spacefaring technology, iron generals with the heads of eagles, arenas full of slavering outer space slimebeasts, and a hapless couple from a quiet English village, caught up in it all and needing to be rescued and sent back home once the Doctor has toppled the regime.

As you do, if you’re the Fourth Doctor.

Alan Barnes, in translating all that to an audio-friendly version, has recaptured that sense of grandeur, of scope, of a million centurions and a billion citizens stretching this Roman reality into a vista in your brain. And he delivers the relative smallness of the Doctor and his new friends from the village of Stockbridge when compared to the might of that empire very effectively too. This is a story of some stainless steel rats in the Roman wainscoting, working away to bring down if not the empire itself, then the forces that have permeated it and turned it into a force for ultimate evil.

Tom Baker in this story is very full-on, from telling jokes to slimebeasts to facing down generals and invasive alien parasites. He’s Tom Baker, still, but with David Tennant’s energy. The surprising thing is that while, based on that description, you could easily end up with a Doctor you want to punch in the face, Baker absorbs the challenge masterfully and bounds about the place like a bolt of audio lightning.

There are some simply barking mad bits of invention in this story – ‘bacta-guns’ being a notable case. They’re guns which rust metal. Sounds insane when you first hear it, but when you consider that your legions are made of iron, it all clicks into place. The villains too have a name which at least at first appears to be taking the mickey. But they’re well and creepily rendered on audio – in fact, if anything, their delivery on audio is considerably creepier than it was in the comic strips, so what you end up with in The Iron Legion is a story that’s in its own pocket universe of Who, but that within that universe, with a slightly different Fourth Doctor, works brilliantly well, delivering a pulse-pounding, air-punching, nail-biting story, studded with laughs both subtle and immature, and ultimately wrapped around a sad and powerful sacrifice.

The Iron Legion flies past, whipped along at pace and directed with confidence and brio, meaning you don’t get the time to sit and think ‘Hang on, how does that work?’ Accept it – you’re in the comic strip universe of Who now. Go with it, and The Iron Legion will give you a fantastic ride.

The Star Beast is a different kettle of fish altogether. Set in a Yorkshire village, it almost has the flavour of a Companion Chronicle, focusing on the lives of two oddball pals, Sharon and Fudge, who come across something odd in a garden shed. Beep the Meep is fluffy, with big eyes and a seemingly sweet nature – he’s a pre-Mogwai Mogwai in fact, and Sharon and Fudge decide to nurse him back to health, to help him get to his ship, and to get him home.

Sound like a riff on ET – The Extra-Terrestrial? Two years before the movie came out, sorry, and arguably a more realistic take because (spoiler alert, but you’ve had forty years!), Beep the Meep is an utter Star Bastard, covered in fluff and ready to burn whole star systems just for fun. The space police who are hunting the little gremlin down are decidedly less cute, less cuddly and less inclined to look up at you with big wet melting eyes and go ‘Meeeeeeeeep.’

When the Doctor arrives, he’s a more open-minded broker between the hunted Meep and the hunting space cops, the Wrarth Warriors, bringing the wisdom of the Time Lords to the question of whether cuteness necessarily means righteousness. The story unfolds as Beep the Meep does what’s necessary to try to evade the justice of the Wrarth, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by the Yorkshire kids. While it feels at this remove quite a comical satire, and while it’s been aped many times (we’re looking at you, Galaxy Quest), the new audio version bursts with fun and freshness, both in the adaptation and especially in the cast – with Sharon and Fudge coming gloriously to life in the voices of Rhianne Starbuck and Ben Hunter respectively, and Bethan Dixon Bate out-Meeping all-comers in the cuteness stakes. While still firmly in the comic strip universe of Who, rather than the more familiar universe of Tom Baker’s Time Lord, the fun of The Star Beast is that it’s bonkers in a uniquely British way, with a balance of optimism and 1970s realism that makes us laugh four decades on, not least at how much of the British national character has actually changed since then.

If you enjoyed these adventures when they first appeared, chances are high you’ll want to have a listen to them just to see how they fare on audio. If you’re young enough to still have your own hair and teeth, these stories may well come at you sideways and initially make you think ‘Well, that’s #NotMyDoctor.’ You’re right. It isn’t. It’s the Doctor siphoned through a print dimension, originally aimed at an audience which didn’t include you, but brought up to date and poured into your lugholes. It’s not, by any means, your normal Fourth Doctor programming. It is, however, enormous fun in a universe where the Doctor was a little bit sillier and more childlike than even the universe’s leading Jelly Baby-scoffer ever got on TV. Accept that you’re in a kind of Unbound Fourth Doctor universe, and let the comic strip adventures tickle you today.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Syndicate Master Plan Vol 1 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s getting a syndicate together.

As universal legend Tom Baker turns 85, it’s time to take your unfeasibly long scarves out of mothballs and wrap ’em round your necks. The Fourth Doctor is back, and it’s 1978 all over again – only better. Less Yorkshire Ripper. Less Margaret Thatcher. More Jane Slavin. Better.

If you’ve never encountered Jane Slavin before, you’re in for a treat.

Of course, if you have encountered Jane Slavin before, you’re still in for a treat, there’s just more chance that you’ll know it before we start.

Slavin plays the first brand spanking new Fourth Doctor companion Big Finish has created, Police Constable Ann Kelso, in this eighth series of Fourth Doctor stories, and she first encounters the Fourth Doctor in The Sinestran Kill by Andrew Smith.

Andrew Smith – as you probably already know – spent decades as a police officer between initially being a clever, inventive, philosophically interesting writer…and again being a clever, inventive, philosophically interesting writer. He also has form in introducing us to new Fourth Doctor companions, having been the writer who gave Adric his first – and probably, if we’re honest, finest - couple of hours in Full Circle.

For Kelso, Smith gives us a classic ‘The Doctor investigating an anomaly’ story that pays a degree of homage to Sixties and Seventies British police drama, before becoming a thing that’s pure Andrew Smith, unpeeling reality like layers as people and aliens turn out to be more than we – or even they - think they are.

Tom Baker gets more and more brightly luminous as his time with Big Finish goes on, and the cast here gives him the leeway to be the mercurial Fourth Doctor, while never underselling the reality of their characters’ lives. Listen out for Ewan Bailey and Glynis Barber as gang bosses Hugo and Kathy Blake particularly, but as is frequently the case in New Who, it’s the new companion actor who’s given most time and space to show us why both the actor and the character, deserve a place on board the Tardis. Slavin’s Kelso is practical, level-headed, not one to freak out in a bizarre alien crisis when people are swapping skins, chasing her through Scotland Yard or, for reasons of which they’re not entirely sure, turning out to be really keen to assassinate mild-mannered shop owners. Where Kelso comes in the pantheon of the Fourth Doctor’s friends, only time will tell, but it’s clear that Slavin and Baker have a tremendous friendly chemistry which translates to the drama and lets you easily accept PC Kelso as a fellow traveller in time and space. Above all, she comes across as being useful in the stories in this first set, as though, while the Doctor was off being all clever and smiley and ultimately saving everyone, you could stick with Kelso and she’d keep you alive.

Phil Mulryne’s Planet of the Drashigs is a simple, glorious joy ride. It’s Jurassic Park – with Drashigs. But Mulryne gives you your money’s worth of invention. We’re only familiar with the Drashigs from Carnival Of Monsters, where they were huge and crawly and with the heads of Hell’s Jack Russells – but just as in Jurassic Park, there wasn’t just one kind of big scaly bugger to run away from or be fascinated by, Mulryne invents a gorgeous array of Drashigs (really rather forcefully making the case for a TV re-do with 21^st century visuals) – there are the big scary swampy Drashigs we know and run from, but there are also (get this, it’s terrifying) albino, burrowing, take the legs out from under you Drashigs (surely the stuff of Lair of the White Drashig sequels?), and then there are the smaller, pack-hunting Emerald Drashigs – the velociraptors of the story – who are a bit too damned clever for your own good if you happen to be trapped in a reserve with them.

Phil Mulryne takes the terrifying prospect of a reserve full of multiple Drashig-types and adds even more layering though – it’s not just ‘Let’s run away from Drashigs for an hour.’ The Jurassic Park style disaster movie depends on the intellectual hubris of humanity, and with the Drashigs, Mulryne invents freely, giving us new reasons to be fascinated by the terrifying predators, and also adds a dimension that takes them beyond the howling nightmare they’ve previously been. Fenella Woolgar shines as Vanessa Seaborne, a lynchpin to the new dimension of the Drashigs, and listen out too for Lizzie Roper playing somewhat against vocal type as Trencher. There’s also a practically unrecognisable touch of audio-helper Dan Starkey here, adding a whole new string to his bow. Big Finish has a strong history of reinventing one-hit wonder TV monsters and villains and taking them forward in exciting ways, and with this story, Phil Mulryne writes himself into the pantheon as Drashig-Master. More, in future, would be really rather fun. After all, it’s not as though the Jurassic Park franchise stopped after a single outing, and with the new elements Mulryne brings to them here, there’s little reason why the Drashigs too couldn’t expand their place in the Doctor Who universe in some genuinely interesting ways.

Next up, Simon Barnard and Paul Morris give us a celebrity historical story that’s far more than the sum of its parts, The Enchantress of Numbers. When you learn that the most central of its parts is Ada Lovelace, mathematical genius and one of the world’s first computer programmers, it’s probably enough to tell you to strap in. There are all sorts of mad, wonderful, referential elements here, as well as a fundamental storyline that’s elegantly timey-wimey (imagine the Terminator doing advanced mathematics to save its world and you’re onto something), and yet at its core, heartbreakingly human. In terms of the story dynamics, it’s also a solid example of the ‘Doctor and Companion Do Upstairs Downstairs’ model, as the Doctor hobnobs with Ada on trips to the church to pay tribute to her father, (the sheer force of bad behaviour that was Lord Byron), and to the tavern to fleece the locals at cards, while Ann goes downstairs to investigate maids, butlers and secret tunnels that may or may not exist at any given time. There’s a chance the timey-wimey mathy-wathiness of the plot might slip by you towards the end, but that just means it repays a second listen, and it ends with a lovely moment of classic Tom Baker era fun, reminiscent of City of Death. For listeners who love their stories to drip with warm, delicate characterisation, Finty Williams’ Ada will probably make The Enchantress of Numbers the highlight of the set.

And Series 8 part 1 ends on a solidly retrospective note with The False Guardian by Guy Adams. The Doctor and Ann land in the grounds of exclusive spa-cum-asylum-cum-prison, tangle with Varga plants (Oh yes, nostalgia-fans, this has your name written all over it), and meet a patient named Nigel Colloon who thinks he’s someone else entirely. The creepiness factor in this story is high, and there are dark deeds behind the hot stone massages. Kelso gets to show off her rather-more-than-beat-cop analytical and sneakiness skills as she goes wandering purposefully off, and the story ends on a mid-season cliff-hanger which both raises the nostalgia factor three more notches and begins to make you wonder about the whole ‘Syndicate Master Plan’ sub-title of the series. What’s more, John Shrapnel plays Colloon – even if you can’t immediately place his face, two or three words of ‘that voice’ and you’ll know who he is and be more than happy to spend an adventure in his company.

The Series 8A box set is a must-get audio because Tom Baker remains a solidly quintessential Doctor, seeming if anything to get better as he ages. Jane Slavin was born to be a companion to his Doctor and Ann Kelso manages to show us lots of fun, sensible companion action, while seeming like there’s still lots we want to get to know about her. And the writers here have given us a smorgasbord of Who-styles – from Smith’s alien gang warfare hiding in plain sight through Mulryne’s Reinvention of the Drashigs and Barnard and Morris’ sensitive celebrity historical, to Adams’ update on some nostalgic notes set on a world of gruesome body horror and professional smiles. Everyone serves the work, and the work serves the legend of the Fourth Doctor, while introducing us to a great new companion who has more to give.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Fourth Doctor Adventures Series 7A - by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s eight years old again.

When Tom Baker was eventually coaxed into performing in Big Finish audio adventures, reprising his role as the Fourth Doctor, there was initial joy, and then, when he delivered Destination Nerva in 2012, for me at least, there was a touch of sadness. His voice had changed, as voices do over time, and he sounded rather frail – the spirit tentative but willing, but the physical apparatus, if not broken, then changed to a point where it sounded inherently sad.

Spin forward, as you can if you happen to have a time machine, to 2018.

Tom Baker now, in 2018 (or 2017 when these stories were recorded) is the Tom Baker of the 1970s. His voice sounds rejuvenated, and, as he maintains in interviews, he’s found a job that gives him such pleasure, and brings him such love and adoration from armies of fans again, that his performances these days are as exuberant, as lightning-fast and layered and turn-on-a-dime as they ever were. Tom Baker is the Doctor in 2018, just as he was in 1978, and if you’re doing a job in your eighties as well as you did in your forties, then you’re an extraordinary person too.

Series 7 of the Fourth Doctor Adventures takes an unusual step, releasing the first three stories (two single-disc stories and a double-discer) both as individual tales and as a galumphing collection, a banquet of Baker to get your teeth well and truly stuck into, and there are things to say about it, but the first thing to do is go and buy it, because there’s not a disappointing story here.

First up, Sons of Kaldor. Kaldor Robots (the rather more politically neutral term for what everyone recognises as the Robots of Death), in the hands of Andrew Smith, a writer who’s always got a point to work around, and who builds strong stories with layers of characterisation and questions. You know that’s going to be good as soon as you read Kaldor Robots and Andrew Smith.

There have of course been a few different follow-ons from Robots of Death. There was a whole series of Kaldor City audios in the dark days between iterations of Doctor Who. There was a novel, Corpse Marker, and there was at Big Finish the Seventh Doctor story which introduced future companion, Med-Tech Liv Chaenka, Robophobia. Smith introduces us to another new way of using and seeing the Robots of Unfortunate Reprogramming, bringing the Fourth Doctor and Leela to a shipful of them, all of whom seem to have amnesia about their mission. When our time travellers discover two bodies in the medical bay, we’re invited to wonder what’s really going on, and to get it wrong. Smith builds a world outside the ship, a world inside the ship, and eventually brings the two into harmony and focus to build a bigger picture that makes sense of every conundrum he’s posed. You’ll fly through The Sons of Kaldor, partly because it’s the Robots of Freakin’ Death, but more because he yanks you through at speed, making you ask questions that have you impatiently waiting for the answers to come clear. The end pays off your curiosity, without ever making the answers too trite, too pat – there are still questions to ponder at the end, partly because the truth about what happens in The Sons of Kaldor is bigger than a single story can accommodate, but also, one sneakily suspects, because a sequel story would be lovely, thank you very much.

Having waxed lyrical about Tom Baker, can we talk about Louise Jameson for a moment? Louise Jameson has always been an enormously good, incredibly intuitive actor. On screen, she took a role that was supposed to be ‘Eliza Doolittle in a leather bikini’ and brought a sense of the bright child to her, making Leela feel ‘real’ in the most surreal of circumstances. Watch her in The Sun Makers, watch her in The Face of Evil or The Robots of Death, and see her being fully possessed of her own – Leela’s – thoughts and feelings, whatever the Doctor was doing or saying. She’s continued that great work at Big Finish, broadening Leela out in several stories, showing us how she thinks and feels as her time with the Doctor, and her time in the wider universe continues. The Crowmarsh Experiment, by David Llewelyn, isn’t exactly a Companion Chronicle, but it is a very strong Leela story, where she’s made to question the reality of her life, the certainty of her sanity and the boundaries of her trust in the Doctor, especially as someone who looks and sounds exactly like the Doctor is urging her to come back ‘to reality’ – the reality of a life on Earth in the 1970s, of a husband and children who want her back from the delusion of her life in time-travel. It’s a wrenching piece of character drama, and it’s arguably, by virtue of its depths and layers, the stand-out story of the set. You genuinely feel for Leela by the end of the piece, both in terms of the life she didn’t live and the fact that you’ve just seen a glimpse into a world for which she subconsciously yearns. It’s strong, affecting stuff, The Crowmarsh Experiment, and if you’re at all that way inclined, there may be teardrops to shed by the end of it.

The third story, The Mind Runners/The Demon Rises, by John Dorney, is probably the best sci-fi epic movie you’ll never see. It’s in the vein of a lot of eighties and nineties sci-fi that really took the genre forward – your Blade Runner, your Matrix, a lot of the best 2000AD – and like those other works, it unfolds, layer after layer, taking you from a teen trend, the idea of ‘mind running,’ or surfing into other people’s consciousness, to see through their eyes, think through their brains, through the highest echelons on the planet Chaldera, to several other levels and strata of society before you find out what’s really going on. Starting with the basic premise of mind running, the Doctor and Leela discover that mind runners have committed what looked like suicide, despite having no previously self-destructive thoughts or inclinations. There’s talk of conspiracy, and an urban bogeyman has grown up – people say the suicides encountered the Night Mind, a force of will so dark it corrupts anyone who comes into contact with it.

But while that would be story enough in some circumstances – and give a clear, linear battle for the Doctor and Leela to face, Dorney goes much much further to show us the world of Chaldera, from political forces worried about what the mind runners might be able to discover about what they’re up to, to police who are just trying to get to the truth of what’s happening, to interestingly psychotic semi-liquid supervillains, to cults who believe that the flesh is an abhorrence and only the mind (in suitably mechanical avatars) should survive, and more besides. There is such texture in Dorney’s world, and it’s all so oddly, believably realistic that you stand no chance of working out what really is going on from any kind of standing start – it’s not till at least halfway through the second disc that you begin to have an inkling of what’s actually happening on Chaldera, and when you do, it flips everything you think you know on its head.

The Fourth Doctor, Series 7A is both a celebration and an extension of everything Tom Baker and Louise Jameson did on screen, into a wider, more colourful, less budget-restricted audio universe – The Sons of Kaldor gives you a fresh new take on one of their most successful TV encounters; The Crowmarsh Experiment puts the emphasis on Leela in a way which would never have been allowed on 1970s TV, but which in 2018 makes the Doctor and his companions feel much more like real friends, looking out for and trusting in each other; and The Mind Runners/The Demon Rises is a sci-fi epic that would take at least New Who budgets and timescales to put on screen, and more probably Hollywood capabilities.

Between them, they’re a fantastic start to the seventh series of adventures for the Fourth Doctor, four joyous hours of audio-TV that will leave you entirely satisfied, but hungry for the release of the next set.

Big Finish Reviews+ The First Doctor Adventures, Volume 1 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s in an Unbound Dimension.

Here’s the thing.

People die.

Every day, they just keel over and stop being. As the Doctor would say, that’s fine – everything has its time, and everything dies. Even the people who, because they played a certain role, have become immortal in our imaginations. We’ll die too, one day, and they will go on being immortal in someone else’s imaginations, because – well, because that’s what immortality means.

In the world of audio drama though, you can be reborn as somebody else, and then, to some extent they’ll be immortal too, for playing you, playing someone that people have taken to their hearts. If you want to keep up your immortality, sooner or later that has to be true, and that has to be OK.

Big Finish has, for instance, recast Jon Pertwee as Tim Treloar, and now the Third Doctor, immortal as he is because of Pertwee, is having new ideas through the body and the voice of Treloar. And that’s fine. The company also frequently uses Frazer ‘Holy gods, that’s uncanny’ Hines to play the Second Doctor, rather than the annoyingly extinct Patrick Troughton, who made him famous. Elliot Chapman now plays Michael Craze playing Ben Jackson, and both William Russell and Peter Purves have got their different versions of William Hartnell’s First Doctor down beautifully.

And that’s fine too.

I mention all this by way of prelude to telling you I had no enthusiasm for this box set. None at all.

David Bradley’s a fantastic actor, and playing William Hartnell in An Adventure In Time And Space, I thought he was entirely peerless. I wasn’t, however, in favour of his being written into the actual TV Doctor Who as the First Doctor, because, to my mind he neither looked nor sounded like the character when dressed in the get-up. Time however had passed between An Adventure and Twice Upon A Time, and Bradley did enormously good work on screen, winning me over to his interpretation of the First Doctor (despite the occasionally heavy-handed writing which made the First Doctor out to be more blatantly sexist than he ever was on screen).

And I still had absolutely no enthusiasm for this box set, because while the other members of this Tardis crew (Jamie Glover as Ian, Jemma Powell as Barbara, and Claudia Grant as Susan) are all fine actors in their own right, their roles in An Adventure had been minimal, and they felt cast more as lookalikes than especially as sound-alikes. So bringing them across to audio felt like a visual cash-in without, necessarily, the vocal skills to support it.

So – does it work? Could a box set like this convert me?

Well, mostly yes…and a little no.

There are two four-part adventures in the first volume of The First Doctor Adventures – The Destination Wars, which takes the crew to an alien world, and The Great White Hurricane, which is a pure historical that drops our heroes into 19^th century New York and entangles them in the lives of the local gangs in the shadow of a great big meteorological time bomb – a superstorm blizzard that is due to hit the whole east coast.

The first thing to say is that the writing is superb in both stories – Matt Fitton poses a great philosophical question about whether the ends justify the means in The Destination Wars, and Guy Adams gives us a pulse-pounder that works like a much better version of The Day After Tomorrow in The Great White Hurricane. As might be expected of these experienced hands, there’s barely a note wrong in either of the stories, either in terms of delivering adventures with solid hooks, engaging characters and proper dilemmas, or of evoking the period of the first two years of Doctor Who on screen.

In Fitton’s story particularly, the excitement is especially pulled along by the inclusion of what is now the earliest audio version of the Master, played by James Dreyfus. Yes, really, James Dreyfus, known to generations of Britcom-watchers as Constable Goody in The Thin Blue Line, or as Tom Farrell in Gimme Gimme Gimme. Known, possibly, to most Americans as the camp workmate of Hugh Grant in Notting Hill. That James Dreyfus…is the Master.

Nails it.

Totally, utterly, without a moment’s hesitation, nails it. Sounds like nothing for which he’s best known, but channels the darkness efficiently into a slightly pre-Delgado version still very much on the side of dark sanity, rather than the increasingly demented versions of Alex Macqueen or Michelle Gomez. James Dreyfus: you’ll believe a voice can sound elegantly malignant.

The dilemma of The Destination Wars taps into the sad historical reality that war is an accelerator pedal for technological advancement, and brings the Tardis crew into the lives of a family on a far-distant planet, as time passes and war is brought, intentionally, to them. There’s a neat touch of proto-Salamander underpinning the story, the Master as Enemy of An Entirely Different World, playing both sides against the middle to boost their advancement for his own unspeakable ends. Bradley and Dreyfus become a solidly antagonistic pair, more bluntly adversarial than Pertwee and Delgado, Davison and Ainley, Tennant and Simm or Capaldi and Gomez, and the dynamic of soured, embittered friendship helps power the drama along.

The Great White Hurricane fulfils its destiny as a pure historical by making the weather the big bad, and separating our heroes early. Much of the story is a quest by each of them to find the others and get back to the Tardis, which rings true to the period. The adventures they have along the way, including internecine teen gang wars, a mother in search of her stolen child, a frozen train full of stranded passengers and a frozen river leading to some Titanic action and an all-hands-on-deck effort to save lives are rich in characterization, meaning we enjoy the time we spend in New York, while still feeling the imperative pull of the weather that’s about to hit.

So – all good then?

Almost.

Bradley gets quite quickly into the swing of the audio adventures, and you begin believing that he’s just giving ‘another interpretation’ of the First Doctor you know and love. The rest of the Tardis crew though deliver their characters with varying degrees of success. Suffice it to say that in one case, the disparity between the performance of the original on screen and the performance here in audio goes beyond distracting and hits levels that disconnect the listener entirely from the character being played. It rather detracts from the drama when characters are put in peril if, whenever you hear them, you’re made to think ‘Who’s that again? No, really?’, and that’s what happens on this box set, though it’s more noticeable in The Great White Hurricane because in The Destination Wars, the Bradley-Dreyfus double act and the philosophical meat of the story does much to distract from that feeling of disconnection.

The stories are still compelling, and Bradley leads a bold effort to reimagine the First Doctor and his friends for the 21^st century, allowing them to have new adventures. I would like to have been entirely wrong about the ‘lookalike, not sound-alike’ thing, and in forthcoming volumes, they may well square the circle and bring the one particularly distracting performance at least within a distance where with a hearty jump, the imagination of the listener can convince itself the character at least is the same, even if the person playing them is entirely different. In Volume 1, though, I’m only mostly wrong.

Mostly wrong is absolutely good enough to give this box set a whirl, incidentally. You can safely spend your money on the basis of my being mostly wrong.

But here’s to a future in which I’m increasingly, decidedly and thoroughly wrong.