Audio and radio play reviews

And so it is that we come to the end of the Stockbridge trilogy, in which the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa travel to the past, present and future of Stockbridge because Big Finish love continuity and it was in the comics in the 80s or something.

We’ve had the past, which tried to be Monty Python and failed, but wasn’t bad when it was serious; then we had the present, which was pretty good apart from a few dodgy performances and odd directorial choices.

Now we have the future. The story carries straight on from the previous one again, except the Doctor and Nyssa appear to have ended up in some futuristic tourist park populated by Northerners and aliens, including Lisa Tarbuck and Keith Barron.

Except, as the title of the story and the cover should tell you, things aren’t what they appear to be.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 129 – Plague of the Daleks”

Big Finish occasionally come up with some nice ideas for subscriber bonuses. Okay, Return of the Krotons wasn’t one of them but Company of Friends was at least a good idea, even if it was poorly executed. However, every time they do it, they say it’s going to be exclusive to subscribers, don’t manage to get many people to subscribe on the strength of it (what? I get three Sylvester McCoy plays and the Key2Time season? Whoopee), so end up releasing them anyway.

So it is with An Earthly Child, a potentially very good idea, which is already available to pre-order, having been sent to subscribers in December. In it, Paul McGann journeys to the now defunct future in which the Daleks mined out the Earth’s core to turn it into a spaceship, so he can visit Susan, his granddaughter.

Yes, the Doctor not only has kids, a wife and probably a mum, he also had a granddaughter – the very first companion to the very first Doctor, William Hartnell, in the very first story, An Unearthly Child (which you can watch all of on YouTube). Played by Carole Anne Ford, she stayed behind on Earth to help rebuild the planet and married a man called David Campbell.

Ford is back as Susan for this story, set 30 years after the invasion, and she’s accompanied by Paul McGann’s son, Jake McGann, who appropriately enough plays Susan’s son, Alex – the Doctor’s great-grandson.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – An Earthly Child”

Big Finish seem to have a new plan: trilogies. We’ve had the Key2Time season followed by three Seventh Doctor stories. We’ve just had another trilogy – the jettisoning of Charley Pollard from the mainstream Doctor Who Big Finish universe, except in Companion Chronicles. There’s the forthcoming Seventh Doctor/Nazi scientist trilogy, which is going to be followed by the Sixth Doctor/Jamie trilogy which is going to be followed by the Fifth Doctor/Nyssa/Tegan/Turlough trilogy (well, it’s a two-parter so far, but…).

But for now, we have the Stockbridge trilogy. This sees the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa deal with events in Stockbridge’s past, present and future. Apparently, Stockbridge was big back in the DWM comic strip of the 1980s (I missed it somehow), so this kind of follows on. Joy.

Here, though, before we get ahead of ourselves, we have the fifth Doctor and Nyssa turn up in Stockbridge, 1899, to watch a mummers’ play. Despite being handed down word-for-word since the middle ages, somehow the Doctor, an Earl of Space and a Lord of Time, is included in the play’s storyline. How did that happen? Best go back in time and find out, hey?

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 127 – Castle of Fear”

Over the years, there’s been a surprising amount of Doctor Who scripts that were never made: stories that fell afoul of budgetary and logistical issues; stories that were too similar to others; stories that were too awful for human consumption – the list of reasons for their non-existence goes on.

However, the biggest one-off clump of unmade Doctor Who stories came after the end of Colin Baker’s first full season, when Michael Grade decided to ‘rest’ the show. Eighteen months later, it returned with the 14-part The Trial of a Time Lord and the original ‘season 23’, upon which production had already begun, never saw the light of day.

At least not on tele. Some of them were novelised by Target back in the 80s/90s, but now Big Finish has taken it upon itself to adapt some of these missing season 23 stories as full cast audios; it’s also having a go at some other ‘lost stories’ from previous seasons in a new range of plays collectively called… well, have a guess.

The first of the range is The Nightmare Fair, former producer Graham Williams’ first solo script. He was given the task of writing a story that reintroduced the First Doctor’s whacky enemy, the Celestial Toymaker from (who’d have guessed it?) The Celestial Toymaker. To make things even easier, the story also had to be set in Blackpool.

Are you feeling the thrill yet?

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – The Lost Stories – 01 – The Nightmare Fair”