Audio and radio play reviews

The Zygons are one of those Doctor Who monsters that are a firm fan favourite yet only ever appeared on-screen once.

Stars of the Tom Baker story The Terror of the Zygons, they scared, mainly thanks to the superb direction of blog god Douglas Camfield but also because of their shape-changing abilities, biological technology and weird lifestyle – they need to feed off the milk of the Loch Ness monster to survive.

They also amused, mainly because it was really hard to do convincing blue-screen work back in 1975. Still, who knows? Maybe the Loch Ness monster really does look like it’s made of rubber and has a very stiff jaw.

Since then, they’ve popped up in all manner of unofficial and official tie-ins: Tenth Doctor novels, comic strips, New Adventures and videos.

So it seems appropriate that Big Finish have brought them back for an Eighth Doctor and Lucie adventure that is both silly and creepy.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – The Zygon Who Fell to Earth”

It’s a bit hard to know what to say about this one other than, "Ho, hum, another Sixth Doctor and Evelyn story."

To a certain extent, that’s because the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn stories seem to have fallen into a rut of late. The Doctor and Evelyn (who’s a history professor, you know) land in the past somewhere. They find something oddly out of sync with local history. They discover a boogly woogly thing is responsible. They fix it in a non-threatening, slightly slow and old manner while bickering in an old people "out on a day trip from a rest home" sort of way. The end.

Come on guys. Get your verve back. You had it once.

Unfortunately, Assassin in the Limelight follows closely in this rut since it employs a previous rut co-habittee’s villain (or is it villains?) – Leslie Phillips’s Dr Robert Knox, last seen being mean to the slow-witted David Tennant in Medicinal Purposes. The Doctor and Evelyn’s mission this time: stop John Wilkes Booth from being assassinated. (Ed: shurley shome mishtake?)

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – Assassin in the Limelight”

I’m sitting here wondering how this Big Finish downloads ‘taster’ service is going to work. In essence, it’s simple. Pay 99p and you can download the first episode of any play. Like it and you can download the rest for £12.

All well and good, you might think. But the trouble with most Big Finish plays is that the first episode usually isn’t that good. Either it’s terminally dull set-up for a story that only later turns out to be intriguing, or it’s all a complicated set-up for a story that only explains itself in the fourth act.

Case in point: The Haunting of Thomas Brewster. This comes across in the first episode as a cross between a piece of Oliver Twist fan fiction and a standard twisty turny time-travel story in which everyone starts popping up and laying down plans before events have caused them to happen – or they’ve even arrived.

Yet, if you miss out on it, you’ll be missing out on a new (and possibly interesting?) series of fifth Doctor adventures.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – The Haunting of Thomas Brewster”