Big Finish

News about and reviews of plays produced by production company Big Finish

Review: Doctor Who – The Girl Who Never Was

2 January 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

The Girl Who Never Was (Doctor Who)

Ah Charley. How we’ll miss you. Well, assuming we’ve not been listening to any of your stories since the Divergent Universe disaster.

When Big Finish was starting up and figured it could invent a few new companions of its own, Charley was the only one of the new companions who could be described as good or popular (sorry Evelyn and Erimem fans). Enthusiastic, actually wanting to travel with the Doctor for a change and with a good chemistry with the eighth Doctor, she made even the cruddier stories tolerable. We also were treated to a precursor to the Rose/Doctor romance that was tastefully done and with a near-adult depth that the onscreen equivalent would be sorely lacking.

Then C’rizz turned up, the writers forgot how to write for Charley, the romance wasn’t so much nipped in the bud as snapped off at the root without any real explanation and the best companion of the Big Finish range quickly became a next generation Tegan or Adric.

As people have been surmising since Sheridan Smith landed the BBC7 companion gig, Charley’s days have been numbered for quite some time. Following the departure of C’rubbish in Absolution, we now have Charley’s swansong in The Girl Who Never Was. Written by her creator, Alan Barnes, it gives us more than a few reminders of why she was once so good as well as few bemusing moments that I will now coin a new adjective to describe: Bigfinishian.

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Audio and radio play reviews

Review: The Companion Chronicles – Old Soldiers

19 December 2007 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Old SoldiersAfter yesterday’s tussle with awfulness – aka the Companion Chronicles’ Helicon Prime – we come face to face with something a whole lot better. Nicholas Courtney’s Brigadier has been a companion of sorts – or at the very least a practising Friend of the Doctors – since the Troughton years, appearing opposite him, Hartnell (in The Three Doctors), Pertwee (for most of the era), Tom Baker (a couple of stories), Davison (The Five Doctors and Mawdryn Undead) and Sylvester McCoy (Battlefield). He’s also been something of a Big Finish regular, cropping up in The Spectre of Lanyon Moor (with Colin Baker), Minuet in Hell (with Paul McGann), the UNIT range of stories as well as a few others. So quite why they need him to have one of his own Companion Chronicles, I’m not sure.

All the same, of the three stories in the second series of the Companion Chronicles, Old Soldiers is probably the best. A traditional narrative in which Courtney reads the story to the listener rather than to another actor, it’s firmly in keeping with the Pertwee era and fleshes out both the Brigadier and UNIT a little.

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19 December 2007 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

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Audio and radio play reviews

Review: The Companion Chronicles – Helicon Prime

18 December 2007 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Helicon Prime

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.

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The Mind's Eye
Audio and radio play reviews

Review: Doctor Who – The Mind’s Eye/Mission of the Viyrans

13 December 2007 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

The Mind's EyeIt’s quite funny listening to the documentaries on the end of these Big Finish audio plays. Some guy who sounds almost exactly like Russell T Davies (but isn’t) tries to think up questions to ask the actors in the plays. Guest stars repeat like a mantra that their kids will love them for doing it and it’s given them much kudos; regulars will trot out – with all the enthusiasm you can imagine someone asked the same question for 25 years can muster – what it means to them.

And of course the directors, producers and writers all proclaim how absolutely super wonderful and lovely it was to work with X, Y and Z and how the latest effort is more or less the best thing written down on paper since cuneiform was first invented.

Peter Davison is always a bit more refreshing and candid when questioned (as anyone who’s ever listened to any of his DVD commentaries will know). Did you know, for example, that he almost never reads the script before coming into the Big Finish studios? Or that he’ll record three plays in three days?

Still, he can get away with it most of the time. The double-bill of The Mind’s Eye and Mission of the Viyrans is really very good – quite old school, clever and strong on characterisation for the regulars. Yes, it’s got Owen Teale hamming it up something chronic as an evil scientist and Rebecca Front as one of the most uncommitted baddies in recent history. But they both work pretty well.

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