Audio and radio play reviews

An archive of the blog’s reviews of audio and radio plays.

Audio and radio play reviews

Review: Doctor Who – No More Lies

5 February 2007 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Immortal BelovedYou know a play is going to start off badly when the station announcer warns you not to be confused that it starts in the middle of a story. Don’t worry, you won’t haven’t missed anything, she promises, clearly worried the audience isn’t used to difficult concepts or standard Big Finish plot techniques.

She was right, though. It was confusing.

Surprisingly, despite already starting with the second half of an adventure, No More Lies is still a play of two halves. The first one is very stupid and very science-fictiony; the second is a far more emotional, far less stupid affair. In fact, if they’d lopped off that first half (which, of course, was also a second half), it would have been a very good play indeed.

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Audio and radio play reviews

Review: Doctor Who – Phobos

1 February 2007 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Immortal BelovedSo we’ve had something Dalek, something silly, something thought-provoking and now, something traditional. Blah, blah, blah, blah, Doctor and companion arrive, Doctor and companion find people being killed off one by one, Doctor and companion get put in peril and discover monster is behind it all.

Ring any bells with anyone?

Yes, it’s standard Doctor Who plot #3. It worked for countless episodes of the old series (Image of the Fendahl, Curse of Peladon, The Dominators and just about anything else you care to name) and it’s readily deployable to the halfway house between old and new Who that is the Big Finish universe.

The question is, did you feel the fear?

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Kneale Before Nigel

The Quatermass Memoirs

25 January 2007 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

The Quatermass MemoirsI don’t know if you’ve ever done jury service or not. But if you haven’t, you may – or may not – be delighted to hear there’s often plenty of waiting around involved.

It’s up to you what you do with your time, of course. You can read, which will at least enable you to hear the tannoy system telling you where to go to ruin someone’s life. But unless you bring your own books, you’ll be reduced to reading whatever some kind person’s left behind.

Plus somehow, when you’ve just helped send someone down for eight years and everyone on the jury is having to eat massive amounts of chocolate to keep their blood sugar levels up from the shock of all the horrible things they’ve heard, you’re often just not in the mood to read anything too taxing.

You could, if you wanted to, blog. Judging by the GPRS charges on my Virgin bill for this month, this is a bad idea that will clearly bankrupt you.

So audio books are where it’s at. Now you won’t have time to get through all of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (I’m on hour 18 of 34), but something relatively light like a Big Finish play is just what the Doctor ordered.

Unfortunately, I’d listened to all mine already. So instead, I chose to listen to a little known oddity: The Quatermass Memoirs.

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Review: Doctor Who – Immortal Beloved

22 January 2007 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Immortal BelovedIf you’ve been a Doctor Who fan for long enough, you’re probably a bit of a Nigella by now. Take any new Doctor Who story and in an instant you can come up with the recipe used to make it.

Immortal Beloved‘s quite an easy one:

  • 25% Mawdryn Undead
  • 25% State of Decay
  • 50% The Romans.

Ta da!

Are you impressed? Thought not.

Anyway, despite being relatively easy to pin down, Immortal Beloved‘s a reasonable addition to the new BBC7 range of eighth Doctor stories. Better than Horror of Glam Rock, not as good as Blood of the Daleks, it still has some interesting, slightly sicko ideas and some good performances. Apart from son of Who’s, that is, but we’ll get onto that later.

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Review: Doctor Who – Horror of Glam Rock

17 January 2007 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

The Horror of Glam Rock

Well, we’re between cases so I’m using my pre-afternoon break to blog. If I don’t do it now, I never will and there’s no point starting on a whole article just yet. So here we go: Horror of Glam Rock, the second of the Big Finish plays for BBC7.

In contrast to the first story, the grim Blood of the Daleks, HoGR is a relatively jolly piece filled with guest stars previous Big Finish plays could only dream of. While not as good as its predecessor, it’s certainly not the epic disaster it could have been and is actually pretty entertaining.

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