Audio and radio play reviews

First, a brief apology – I’m behind in my Big Finish reviews. Trouble is, while I’ve been working from home for the last week, enabling me to put some actual work into the blog for a change, it means I haven’t been doing any commuting. No commuting, means no iPod listening (except when I’m doing the housework), so I’ve not been listening to any of the plays. Never fear, though, I hope to have reviews of The Bride of Peladon, Condemned and Dead London sometime soon.

But 1st February marked two important events. Number one: Big Finish redesigned its web site again so that it’s almost usable. Almost. They have a slight issue with labelling. You’ll see. And they could do with hiring a proofreader (hint, hint).

Number two: it’s started to sell its plays as downloads. No more ripping to iPod for me then. Woo hoo.

Almost.

Let’s look at the pricing. Price of a two-disc play on CD: £14.99. Price of a download: £12.99. Hmm. Okay, so, you’re not having to pay P&P either, but that’s not a huge reduction. £2 less and I don’t get the CDs, the box liner notes, etc? (Well, I haven’t bought any yet, so maybe you get them as PDFs).

I don’t feel “incentivised” by that. All the same, I suspect that’ll be the way forward for me from now on. How about you?

Mention The Web Planet to almost any Who-er, and you’ll likely as not get a great big smirk in response. It was a story written in the Hartnell days before anyone really ‘knew’ what Doctor Who stories were supposed to be like. A rather brave attempt at hard SF, it involved the planet Vortis, a world populated entirely by various giant-sized species of insect and absolutely no humans other than the Doctor and his companions.

Yes, giant butterflies, ants and larvae on a budget of £2 7s 6d, back before anyone had anything like the technology to do it properly. You can imagine what it was like, even if you’ve never seen it. Go on, imagine it.

Tee hee.

Fortunately, audio plays don’t have this problem so Big Finish, throwing the fifth Doctor and Nyssa at the world of the Menoptera, Zarbi and Venom Grubs, can let their imaginations run wild, content in the knowledge that we’ll do the rest of the work.

Yet somehow, it’s almost impossible not to think one thought while listening to Return to the Web Planet: “Tee hee”.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – Return to the Web Planet”

I don’t remember the Patrick Troughton era of Doctor Who being particularly sh*t. There was a multitude of classics – Tomb of the Cybermen, Invasion, The Moonbase, Enemy of the World, The War Games, The Faceless Ones, and The Mind Robber to name but a few. Sh*t it was not.

So why then have Big Finish, when given two chances to finally put together a couple of Patrick Troughton stories through their Companion Chronicles range, decided that ‘sh*t’ was the defining characteristic of the era? In series one of the Companion Chronicles, we had the Zoe tale Fear of the Daleks, which was just painful to listen to. Now we have Frazer Hines reading another piece of rubbish. Oh dear.

Continue reading “Review: The Companion Chronicles – Helicon Prime”