Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Matt Fitton

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £10.99 (Download)

Release Date: December 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“1950s London: newcomers arrive daily on British shores seeking a fresh start, new opportunities, or simply the chance of a different life. However, some are from much further afield than India or Jamaica...

After an emergency landing, the TARDIS crew must make the best of it, and look to their new neighbours for help. But the Newman family has more than the prejudices of the time to contend with. A sinister force grows in strength amid the pubs, docks and backstreets of London...

And without the Doctor, marooned in a time and place as alien as anything they've ever encountered, Steven and Sara may well face their greatest challenge yet. To live an ordinary life.”

***

This one, according to the CD Extras and David Richardson’s notes, has been in the pipeline for a long, long time now.  Richardson hit upon the central ideas of this play a while back but it’s only now, in the form of An Ordinary Life and with Matt Fitton in the writer’s seat, that we can hear it in all its glory.

You can see why Richardson kept persisting with this idea and holding back until he had found the perfect writer and team: the notion of the Doctor’s companions being forced to live life day by day in a past as alien to them as the far-flung future aboard a starship would be to us (well, me anyway: I cannot speak for the rest of you all) is a good one, and Steven Taylor and Sara Kingdom prove themselves to be the ideal subjects for such a story, as Fitton’s very strong script goes out of its way to show you time and again.  Indeed, such is the strength of the drama and scenery, that it’s acutely disappointing when aliens pop up and turn the tale away from the domestic. (I am certain that this will not be an original observation by any stretch, but all the same, I mean it.)

Perhaps the smartest thing about this play is the time in which it is all set.  It puts us in England in the 1950s with a family of first-wave immigrants, a time of quite some social unrest and upheaval, and Fitton neatly draws parallels between the family with whom Steven and Sara stay, and the companions themselves: both learning, both cautious, both more frightened than they let on.  It could be done in a very clunky manner or grow patronizing, but Fitton never lets that be the case.  He continues with the slight will-they-won’t-they take on Steven and Sara’s relationship as put forward in The Anachronauts (still one of my favourite Companion Chronicles) and develops it slightly, but, again, not enough to rock the boat too much, nor to cause any continuity errors further down the line.  Whether it necessarily needs to happen is a matter of personal taste, really: I’m sure their personal relationship/story could have been as strong without this take on it, but it is far from the worst thing in the world.

Of course, a script is only as strong as its execution, and never more so is that the case when it’s so people-orientated as this one is.  Thankfully, everyone is great.  As Who fans, we practically expect that from both Jean Marsh and Peter Purves, but it really is worth stressing here just how incredibly good they are: this play would crumble without them.  It would also be nothing without its guest cast, and here we have Ram John Holder and Sara Powell in particular delivering about as good a set of performances as Big Finish gives us.  One thing definitely worth saying at this juncture is how good the guest cast has been across this first series of Early Adventures, which bodes very well for the future.

As noted earlier though, things falter when the story shifts from domestic to alien, and sadly it is that which stops this from reaching the dizzy heights that it rightly deserves to scale.  It is a crying shame really, but fewer bodysnatchers and more scenes of Sara kicking policemen to the ground would have given this the 10 out of 10 it probably deserves.

By the time the TARDIS departs and the story ends with that oh-so-familiar theme tune, we feel like we have really grown to know everyone involved, regular- and guest-cast alike, and Fitton has every right to hold his head up high, as does David Richardson, whose dogged persistence has paid off in spades here.  Hearty congratulations to all involved.

And with that, we reach the end of the first series of The Early Adventures.  I’ve noted before flaws I perceive to be present in this series, so it’s not worth retreading old ground here, though I will note that the issue of authenticity chimes again, sadly.  An Ordinary Life is great in that it very cleverly puts 1960s companions into the 1950s, the recent past for contemporary viewers of Hartnell’s adventures, but most of that impact, especially with regards to political and social repercussions, only works now, decades later.  As with some of the very best Companion Chronicles, it makes use of both the present and past simultaneously and plays with them to create something wonderful, but the one thing it is definitely not is period-authentic.  A smart use of 1960s settings and characters? Yes, but not a story that would (or perhaps even could) have been tackled back during the relevant period of Doctor Who.

This recurring issue doesn’t stop the stories from being any good (indeed, you’ll note that three out of four of these reviews have been positively glowing) but it does make Big Finish look a bit silly, or to be more kind naïve perhaps, to keep screaming on about how these accurately recreate 1960s soundtracks.

They do not; they do not come even close, but they’re bloody good fun all the same.  Stop being ashamed of letting them be what they are; drop the slogans and taglines and just admit that these are the new Lost Stories, which in themselves were fuller-cast Companion Chronicles at times.  There’s no shame in that at all.

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Ian Potter

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £10.99 (Download)

Release Date: November 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“Ceres. A tiny, unforgiving ball of ice and rock hanging between Mars and Jupiter.  It’s no place to live, and it takes a special kind of person to work there.

The crew of the Cobalt Corporation mining base know exactly how deadly the world outside their complex is, but the danger isn’t just outside anymore. The systems they rely on to keep them safe are failing and the planet is breaking in.

When the TARDIS strands Steven, Vicki and the Doctor on the base, they have to fight a foe they can barely comprehend to survive.”

***

There comes a point in life when someone appears to be protesting too much.

“I don’t hate Steven Moffat, I just hate this, this, this, this, this and of course this…” is one you often find on Twitter (you can swap ‘Steven Moffat’ for any showrunner or writer and you’ll find the same vitriolic results; he’s just flavour of the month online as I write this), and similar include, “I do like the Daleks, they’re just…”, or “Yes, sure, Red Kangs are best, but have you considered…”

With the extras on this CD, we have a slightly different game.  It’s the “Let’s tell everyone how great this Early Adventures range is, and how different it is to anything that came before it!” game.

It’s slightly unfair of me to focus on the extras for this play, as they may well have been recorded completely out of order, but three releases in and we can almost hear the sweat pouring off of Big Finish’s collective brows as the guest cast are interviewed: was cancelling the Companion Chronicles a smart move? Are these plays going to prove themselves to be the next big thing?

There are ways around this, but I’m not sure that getting assembled cast members to compare Chronicles and Adventures is the way forward.  We have lots of talk about how much better this range is because it’s so much more expansive with a near-full cast; how authentic the scripts are to the eras in which they intend to be from; how different they are.

Now, the first point is a subjective one, so far be it from me to say anything definitive there: for the record, I think both formats have strong points and drawbacks.  The third (to skip ahead) is not exactly true now, is it? Because what this range is, ostensibly, is The Lost Stories but with original scripts (and given some of the Lost Stories scripts were expanded from a handful of words scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet somewhen in the 1960s when half-cut on ale, it’s pushing it to say ‘lost’, really).  In all fairness, they do name-check Lords of the Red Planet as a springboard for this sort of production, but saying it’s a whole new range feels like it is pushing it somewhat.  As for the authenticity issue… well, back in the first release, we had Carol Anne Ford happily remarking that they’d never have done that script back in their day, and this story is all well and good, but most definitely not a 1960s script, but one you can picture being executed with excruciatingly bad CSO and above-average models in the late seventies.

It tries to do what some of the best Companion Chronicles did, and use the fact that Steven Taylor was a space pilot to aid and enhance the script and justify the setting, but everything feels far too… un-1960s-ish, for lack of a better term, to get even close to this supposed authenticity which they aim to hit.  Added to this, the story isn’t anything special as a whole, and when you haven’t got a strong enough story to cover the cracks…

I’m sorry, I’ve mostly gone on about format so far, but sadly the play itself did very little to inspire or indeed excite me across its four parts: by far the weakest of the Early Adventures range so far by quite some distance, and easily the least 1960s-esque release to boot.  It’s just a bit… dull.

Whilst the final series of Companion Chronicles ended on a bit of a damp note due to scripts not feeling quite as polished or exciting as normal (possibly due to focus being more on this range?), I’d still take them regularly rather than get what we’ve had here so far.  Perhaps I am just being jaded and the quality of release will suddenly come on in leaps and bounds? I don’t know.

It’s not as if I haven’t enjoyed them up until now, really, as my previous reviews will attest to.  It just still feels like a sad move to kill the Chronicles off in their monthly form to make way for adventures in a format that isn’t anywhere near as original, clever or authentic as Big Finish would like us to believe, no matter how much the extras try to tell us otherwise.

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Marc Platt

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £10.99 (Download)

Release Date: October 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“England, 1400. Winter. Blood in the snow. Henry IV has usurped the throne, and deposed King Richard II languishes in Pomfret Castle.

Meanwhile the Doctor and his companions preside over New Year revels at Sonning Palace.

But Sonning is a prison, treachery is in the air and murderous Archbishop Thomas Arundel will stop at nothing to crush the rebellion.

As the Doctor and Barbara take the road to Canterbury, Vicki finds a royal friend and Ian is dragged into a dark web of conspiracy at whose heart sits that teller of tales, Geoffrey Chaucer.”

***

Chaucer! You either like Chaucer or dislike him with a fiery intensity that can set whole libraries aflame (just ask any English Literature graduate, we’re all the same).  Me personally? I really like him and think that The Canterbury Tales is fab through and through, and it has forever surprised me that the show never took the plunge and had our heroes meet him.  Well, until now, that is.

Two stories into this new Early Adventures range now, and we’re flung into The Doctor’s Tale, an historical adventure with all the ingredients one would expect from such a tale: shady characters, political shenanigans, someone famous from Earth’s history who one of the companions happens to know a lot about.  This is a far more ‘authentically’ 1960s-esque piece of Doctor Who than the preceding month’s adventure (though I stress again how much I enjoyed that story), and I suspect much of your enjoyment of it will depend on how keen you are on historical adventures, and quite possibly how much you know about Chaucer, though seeing as every effort is made by Marc Platt’s script to fill you in on the historical/political and, indeed, literary backdrop to the era in which this story is set, you shouldn’t struggle too much.

Taking its lead from the Crusade school of thought, Platt separates the TARDIS crew rather swiftly, giving us two separate strands of story that come together nearer the end of the tale.  It’s a neat move which allows the script to breathe more, and gives both William Russell and Maureen O’Brien, on narrating duties, some good, meaty material to really sink their teeth into.

One thing that did really strike me about this story though is how missed Jacqueline Hill is as Barbara.  The absence of Barbara in an historical story was always going to be notable, and never more so here, where we hear her fill in parts of the plot, take a central role in proceedings, and tick that ‘educational and fun’ remit which the show strived for in its formative years, even when she does take a week’s holiday for the third episode (a nice attention to period detail by Platt).  I’m not surprised, therefore, that Big Finish have announced someone coming in on Barbara-narrating duties for future adventures, and am curious to see how that pans out.  As it stands right now though, much like when Katy Manning takes on the Brigadier or the Third Doctor, you can feel a spectre in the room; a piece of the jigsaw missing.  Indeed, perhaps the most fitting tribute to Hill and her portrayal of the character is the fact that her absence is so keenly felt, here more so than William Hartnell himself, and that for this range and its stories to properly work, the gap is going to need to be somehow plugged.  That’s quite some legacy to be leaving years on.

Back briefly to the play in hand though.  Platt’s script feels very evocative of the era in which it apes, and you can almost picture the creaky special effects as people travel from A to B.  It’s richly enhanced by a stellar performance by Alice Haig as Isabella, who infuses her role with a ferocity comparable to Jean Marsh’s in The Crusade and for me was the standout performance in the whole play (no easy task when you also have John Banks giving it his all with genuine conviction), and, two releases in, the range so far.

The Doctor’s Tale may lack the Boy’s Own air of 1950s adventure serial that Domain of the Voord had about it, but stick with it.  It’s a damn fine story, clearly painting the brutality of life under a dogmatic and fanatical regime (in this instance, a religious one), a life with quite the body count by the end of it.  You’ll cheer for Chaucer, hate Thomas Arundel, and feel every ounce of Isabella’s frustration and pain.  And you’ll miss Jacqueline Hill.

What is a Hartnell historical without Hill? Good, but not Wright.

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Andrew Smith

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £10.99 (Download)

Release Date: September 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“The Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara land on the planet Hydra, where Admiral Jonas Kaan leads a vast flotilla of ships trying to elude the vicious race that has invaded and occupied their world. But his ships are being picked off one by one, vessels and crews dragged underwater by an unseen foe.

The time travellers find themselves pitched into battle against the Voord, the ruthless enemy they last encountered on the planet Marinus. As they take the fight to the very heart of the territory now controlled by the Voord the stakes get higher. First they lose the TARDIS... then they lose that which they hold most dear. And that's only the start of their troubles.

In the capital, Predora City, they will learn the truth of what it means to be a Voord. And that truth is horrifying.”

***

The first of Big Finish’s new Early Adventures range, Domain of the Voord has a lot to do across its four episodes: kick the new range off, give the Voord an edge and background/serious identity which they so lacked on screen, and tell a good story in its own right.

The first category is perhaps the hardest to judge, as a lot of whether you enjoy it or not will depend, I suspect, upon what your expectations of the new range are.  I think, in some respects, that Big Finish have rather shot themselves in the foot this time around.

A lot of the advertising surrounding Doctor Who: The Early Adventures has been in monochrome and very clearly paints them out to be evoking the 1960s era: brand new audio stories, told in black and white, cheers the poster, and elsewhere David Richardson, the producer, has said how he wanted to recreate the feeling of listening to soundtrack recordings of missing episodes (still 97 missing, at the time of writing this) with these plays.

With all this in mind then, I think it is more than reasonable to assume that people are going to have specific expectations about the range in mind before pressing play and listening to the Voord do battle with our heroes once again.  With that in mind, I think it is more than reasonable to assume that said people may end up very disappointing when listening to Domain of the Voord and discovering that it is, in fact, nothing like listening to a TV soundtrack, being littered as it is with very audio-typical dialogue (“It’s been two weeks since we set sail on this large, metal boat on a sea of crystalline blue!”) and actors reading out characters’ lines with ‘he said’, ‘she said’ and other such quantifiers after each sentence.  What we actually have is a release somewhere between the Companion Chronicles, the TARGET Talking Books and Big Finish’s Lost Stories range when it covered adventures from the 1960s.  Indeed, it feels far more like the final range than any other, including lost episode soundtracks.  Perhaps some of this will depend on how authentic you found something like The Rosemariners when listening to it: did it feel like an enhanced audiobook, or a TV soundtrack? If the answer is the latter then... well, colour me impressed as I’ve no idea how you’ve happened upon this experience.  If the former, then that’s fine: an enhanced audiobook is a lovely thing to be listening to and in no way a bad thing.

That’s what we’ve got here, only with a brand new script this time as opposed to, erm, a brand new script based on a handful of scribbles, and in many cases flat-out contradicting said scribbles. (The Lost Stories range really was a curious beast at times.)

This is going to disappoint a hell of a lot of listeners, but what’s to be done? Well, maybe clearer advertising and statements, but what we have now is what we have, and that’s the end of that.  Perhaps with the news that roles such as Ben and Barbara have been recast, we have the possibility now of truly recreating that soundtrack nature in the future by having full-cast productions with additional narration, but right now, we’re not there.

Second point: does it feel like we’re back in the 1960s? Again, I would say no.  Not just because of the production values, which are obviously a step up from what could be achieved back then (though why do footsteps dubbed onto the track always feel so intrusive and fake?), but the story feels a mixture of being steeped in that era and true to it, and whole worlds away from it with some complex technical jargon and violence.  Carole Ann Ford herself remarks in the (very, very slim) CD extras that it would never have been done in the 1960s due to the imagery, so again, you wonder what is to come, and just hope it doesn’t disappoint too many people. (Seriously though: the CD extras are so slight, you wonder why they bothered. There’s no discussion at all of it being a new range and what they hoped to achieve, which for a series launch feels like a rather drastic oversight.)

This move away from rigidly trying to ape an era isn’t necessarily a bad thing: a hell of a lot of the first series of The Fourth Doctor Adventures suffered directly because they were hell-bent on emulating an era and forgot to tell necessarily exciting stories, so ignoring this could be a good thing.  It’s just not a thing it claims to be.

To return to the start though, let’s address the other two points I reeled off: does it move the Voord on, and does it tell a good story?

This time, the answer is a resounding yes, to both points.  I’ve mentioned it in these reviews before, but an Andrew Smith script is always an exciting prospect.  Do you remember those distant days way back when the only thing we had from Smith was Full Circle on screen and its rather beautifully written novelisation? (If you haven’t ever read it, please do: it’s the most wonderful love-letter to a show which the writer so clearly adores.) I’m terribly glad that those days are behind us now.  Big Finish should be praised for it.

Here with Domain of the Voord, Smith gives us a very exciting and fun script which intelligently scrutinizes the Voord based on their one on-screen appearance whilst also telling a decent tale in its own right.  The TARDIS crew land upon a ship in the midst of a planet-wide war with an alien aggressor.  Within minutes, Ian is fighting to save the day, the Doctor is in danger of losing the TARDIS, and the crew are aware that the Voord are back and mean business.

Along the way, we get duplicitous prisoners trying to engage in a bit of Stockholm Syndrome, an alien race that present as religious fanatics in many respects, a return to the fun days of TARDIS-loss and separation from the Doctor (I don’t think I’m going to be spoiling much here when I say I cheered when the first person declares the Doctor to be dead early on in the story: it’s always a fun staple of Who when you hear this, as you’re then waiting eagerly to see how he returns to save the day), and glimpses of birthright and blood ties, and what it is that makes someone who they are, or in this instance: what makes a Voord a Voord? Oh, and it also solves the age-old question of what the correct plural of the Alien Voord is: Voord or Voords? (Much like sheep and sheep, Smith favours simply ‘Voord’. So, there we have it.)

Despite my love and adoration of Yartek, Leader of the Alien Voord (to the extent where he ‘wrote’ on my blog weekly, dispensing advice and witticisms for nearly a year), I think it’s safe to say that he never really scared us much.  Smith manages across four episodes to make the Voord feel like a legitimate threat.  It’s no easy task, so credit where credit is due.  That said, the final episode is practically the length of two standard-sized ones, so it’s nearer a five-episode-span than you’d expect, another nail in the authenticity coffin.  In short though, this is a damn fun play, ably acted as ever by Ford and William Russell, and with a frankly terrific guest cast: take a well-earned bow, Daisy Ashford, Andrew Bone and Andrew Dickens.  They are all absolutely brilliant.

In the end though, Domain of the Voord is a difficult one to mark.  In terms of story alone, this is a nine out of ten affair, no questions asked.  However, in terms of what The Early Adventures purported to be and what they actually are, the score surely has to be docked some points.

I’m going to plump for 7 out of 10 in the end, which feels unfair to Smith but hopefully fair to other listeners.  But, please feel free to adjust the score accordingly.  And watch out for the Voord; they’re not as harmless as you’d imagine...