The Penny Dreadfuls, Volume 2, by David Reed and Humphey Ker (BBC Audio) | review by Stephen Theaker

The Penny Dreadfuls are a comedy troupe – Humphrey Ker, David Reed and Thom Tuck – three chaps who retell classic tales in comedic fashion. The stories are scripted, rather than improvisational: Reed writes the plays, with additional material from Ker. This volume collects three of their productions, which originally appeared on Radio 4: Macbeth Rebothered (2014), The Odyssey (2015) and The Curse of the Beagle (2016). A typically appreciative Radio 4 audience is audible throughout, and adds to the atmosphere. Volume one was published concurrently, but, since it looked to be more focused on spoofing actual history, I went straight to the more obviously fantastical volume two. Margaret Cabourne-Smith appears in all three stories, performing most of the female roles, and getting many of the best lines. Susan Calman, Robert Webb, Greg McHugh and Lolly Adefope also take part.

Calman narrates the story of the Scottish play. They call it that as if it’s the only one, she observes, and at the end declares: “This has, without any doubt, been a tale, told by some idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but at least it had some jokes in it.” They were good jokes too, but The Odyssey had the most and biggest laughs, for me, because Robert Webb’s foolish and vain Odysseus is such a funny character, who never fails to rush into trouble in search of spoils. Eventually he comes to a realisation: “I had always believed my actions to be good and honourable because I had followed my heart. Not once had I considered that my heart might be a bit of a bell-end.” In The Curse of the Beagle, a young Charles Darwin travels on the ship of that name, but there seems to be something supernatural going on, involving a hairy beast that uses its long gentleman’s part as a belt. If he doesn’t sort it out, he will fail his degree. It was a bit hard to relax into this one: it’s odd to hear comedy cannibals with funny voices in a modern day radio programme, even if it ends up undermining the old stereotypes.

Listeners who haven’t read the original texts won’t be lost, since the stories are kept quite intact and given room to be told properly – each audio play is about an hour long. Even where jokes are based on the quirks of the original texts (e.g. Odysseus having implausibly repetitive adventures), the plays quickly key listeners in so that everyone can get the next joke about the same thing. It should appeal to anyone who has been enjoying Upstart Crow as much as I have (which is quite a lot): the plays have a similar mixture of clever literary jokes and very silly ones, and they are also narratively very satisfying, with proper heartfelt moments. ****

John Wyndham: BBC Radio Drama Collection, by John Wyndham et al. (BBC Worldwide) | review by Stephen Theaker

This marvellous audiobook collects five full-cast BBC adaptations of John Wyndham’s classic science fiction work – five novels, plus a short story – as well as Beware the Stare, a half-hour documentary from 1998. It’s a ten-hour journey into some catastrophes that are not at all as cosy as I remembered.

Giles Cooper’s chilling six-part adaptation of The Day of the Triffids dates from 1968, and is framed as a record of the events being made years after. Bill Masen found a triffid growing in his garden as a youngster, studied it, and got a job farming them. A triffid sting leaves him in hospital with bandaged eyes during a meteor shower that blinds everyone else. This leads of course to the scenes that inspired the beginnings of 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead, as he emerges blinking into a world gone mad. In this adaptation this sequence is particularly distressing, since we hear the wails of babies as he ruthlessly walks away from their ward. Outside the hospital he finds that people are killing their own children and committing suicide.

It seems odd that mere hours after discovering their blindness people would go to such extremes – wouldn’t you wait a little while to see if the effect wore off? And it’s very hard to like a hero who walks away from crying babies and starts breaking into people’s homes on day one. He meets up with a woman, and they make no effort at all to help other people: their plan – on the first day of the disaster! – is to leave London until everyone has died and all the bodies have finished rotting away. But they become more sympathetic as the story goes on, as the triffids escape from the farms, and as they meet other survivors who are even worse. It’s a very well done adaptation, its only flaw (one it shares with The Chrysalids) being some ear-curdling adult-for-child acting when a young girl joins their group.

At the end of the adaptation what seem to be a set of deleted scenes play out, which are interesting to hear, but it’s easy to miss the start of the next story, The Kraken Wakes. How there has never been a film of this classic novel, when we’re about to get a fifth version of The Body Snatchers, I don’t know. This ninety-minute adaptation is from 1998, and it charts the course of another slow invasion: lights are seen falling into the sea, ships start to go missing, and then, after attempts to blow up whatever’s in the water, coastal towns mysteriously lose their populations. The scenes in which our protagonists witness an attack on a seaside town is terrifying to listen to, the screams of those caught in the attackers’ clutches horribly realistic. Until the truth of it all becomes too obvious to deny, people ignore what’s happening, laugh at the very idea of it. It’s ironic that John Wyndham’s idea of a devastating alien attack proves to be something we’re actually doing to ourselves.

The Chrysalids is rather different to the other novels, in that it begins in the future, after what seems to be a nuclear disaster. Mutation is feared, and those born differently face execution or exile. Not all mutations are visible, though, and a group of children who can thought-speak to each other at a distance struggle to keep their secret, especially when a much more powerful telepath makes herself known. This 1981 adaptation would be fine were it not for the aforementioned adult-for-child acting.

Survival is from 1989, and seems to be from an anthology series. A spaceship full of would-be colonists goes off course, and we see how far they will go in order to stay alive. The ending is gloriously nasty. Doctor Who fans will be pleased to hear Brigadier Nicholas Courtney pop up briefly.

The two-part adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos is from 2003, and is another highlight. It flips the premise of The Chrysalids: the psychic children of that story were the heroes, but here they are the villains, though that seems just to be a matter of perspective. Everyone in the village of Midwich falls asleep, and after a little while the women all realise that they are pregnant. The children, when born, are very strange, and take control of their parents. Whereas the film stuck with the children and their teacher, this version follows the brilliant Bill Nighy and his wife when they leave Midwich, and then return a few years later to see how strange things have got. Like The Kraken Wakes, this is a slow-moving disaster story, and it is all the worse for how natural it all feels.

Chocky is from 1998, and is the story of Matthew Gore, a boy whose imaginary friend is teaching him binary calculations and asking questions about space travel. Unlike some of the other stories, this features a child in the role of the child, and benefits accordingly. It’s Sacha Dhawan, from Iron Fist and An Adventure in Space and Time, who would have been about fifteen at the time.

The audiobook ends with the short documentary, produced to tie in with The Midwich Cuckoos. It’s interesting – and includes clips of other adaptations – though it raises as many questions as it answers: why did John Wyndham burn his diaries? And did the US science fiction magazines of the 1950s really demand the inclusion of explicit sex scenes?

This is an exceptionally good collection, showcasing both the work of a brilliant writer and the talent involved in BBC radio drama. Some of these have been available individually, so being able to get the entire collection for a single Audible token is great value for money. Highly recommended. *****

Children of Eden, by Joey Graceffa (and Laura L. Sullivan) (Simon and Schuster Audio) | review

This is the Audible edition of Joey Graceffa’s first novel. I enjoyed his previous memoir and I was just as pleased with this book. Although it is published under his name, he didn’t actually write it. He probably came up with the ideas, but I think that it might be written by Laura L. Sullivan because she is thanked at the start. He is more well-known as a YouTuber and this is why I was interested in the book. He is very funny in his videos and he comes up with very creative and exciting ideas. I’m a big fan of his.

In this dystopian future couples are only allowed to have one child because they don’t have enough resources. Almost everything is artificial: the plants, the food, everything. The world was saved by Aaron al Baz. He made the Eco Panopticon which is what keeps the world (and the humans) alive. Rowan is a girl who has lived her life as a second child. Her parents didn’t want to kill her so they kept her hidden and had the birth at home so that no-one would know they had a second child. Rowan is Ash’s twin and they are very close but Rowan wishes that she could go outside the wall and make friends.

So she does. She goes outside and has an huge adventure. She meets Ash’s crush and they fall in love and Rowan kisses Lark (Ash’s crush). But then she gets found out and reported so she needs to hide somewhere. Lachlan takes her into the underground, which is a home for second children, and tortures her to check whether she was actually a normal second child. Second children can be identified by their colourful eyes. At birth all legal children have their eyes protected from the artificial air but people can survive a long time without getting their eyes damaged. They go on an adventure that will save the second children but end up saving the world, solving a mystery and revealing secrets.

I really enjoyed the story because it was full of suspense; the writer managed to fit in a lot of other dilemmas while the main storyline was going on. The vocabulary kept me engaged and made me want to keep listening. I felt the panic in the parts with the wall because you never know whether she’s going to get caught or fall. It is definitely open to sequels: it has an ending that could lead on to another story.

I am not really bothered that Joey Graceffa didn’t write it because it’s fun to know that it is based on his ideas, and even though it’s not written by a YouTuber, it’s still a great book. I enjoyed this so much and I would love to read more books by Laura L. Sullivan and listen to more books read by Sarah Grayson. I think that it is very well read by her. She really makes it feel like Rowan is speaking to you, and she also changes the tone of her voice to show different characters very well. If you are a teenager you will especially enjoy this book, as I did. ***** LCT

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This review originally appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #59, which also included stories by Rafe McGregor, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson, David Penn, Elaine Graham-Leigh and Chris Roper.

The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi (Audible) | review by Stephen Theaker

This is a two hour twenty minute story, told in the first person and read with gusto by Zachary Quinto (Spock from Star Trek films eleven to thirteen). He plays Tony Valdez, the dispatcher of the title. We first meet him in a hospital, where his presence in the operating theatre is required by the insurers. He’s quite cagey about the precise nature of his job at first, and we know the surgeon isn’t happy about having him in there. Is he there to kill people if the treatment gets too expensive? Is the patient someone of such significance that the staff will be punished if he dies? Or is this like Nick Mamatas’s The Last Weekend, where someone has to drill the deceased before they turn into zombies? We don’t find out until the operation takes a turn for the worse and Tony has to step in to do his thing. His job is interesting, as is the reason it is needed. The story soon segues into a hardboiled search for a missing dispatcher, while exploring throughout the implications of the difference between Tony’s world and ours. The two-hour length reflects how much this resembles the pilot for a television series, with Tony teaming up with a tough female co-star for an adventure that establishes a strong premise, while leaving plenty more to be investigated. It’s good, and very well read. It was free to Audible members at the time of writing, but if it’s not by the time you read this it is well worth one of your Audible tokens. ***

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This review originally appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #59, which also included stories by Rafe McGregor, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson, David Penn, Elaine Graham-Leigh and Chris Roper.

Doctor Who: The Guardian of the Solar System, by Simon Guerrier (Big Finish) | review

The first story in the fifth series of the Companion Chronicles sees the return for seventy-one minutes of Sara Kingdom (Jean Marsh). Well, sort of. On television she helped the first Doctor defeat the Daleks’ master-plan, and paid the ultimate price. Here, what appears to be a digital copy of her mind has lived on for a thousand years as the host of a guest house with remarkable properties. As the house Sara healed the sick daughter of a man named Robert (Niall MacGregor), and in return he promised to stay there forever, not realising perhaps that forever in that house would be a long time indeed. He has one last thing to ask of her, but before she will hear his request she wants to tell him one last story, a side-quest during her time with the Doctor and space pilot Steven Tyler, when they travelled back in time to discover the dark secret at the heart of the human empire, what powers their flight to the stars. Along the way, she got the chance to meet Bret Vyon, the brother she would betray, when he was still alive. It’s a good story with tender, emotional performances, and a melancholy, downbeat feel, about people caught in the wheels of time, trying to escape the inevitable, trying to escape the past. Stephen Theaker ***

Jago and Litefoot, Series 5, by Jonathan Morris, Marc Platt, Colin Brake and Justin Richards (Big Finish) | review by Stephen Theaker

Professor Litefoot (played by Trevor Baxter) and theatre impressario Henry Gordon Jago (Christopher Benjamin) first appeared in “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”, a popular Doctor Who story starring Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor, and made such an impression that a spin-off was reportedly considered. Good ideas never die, they just wait for their moment, and eventually Big Finish began this series of audio stories for these Victorian “investigators of infernal incidents”. Best of all, their stories are now available on Audible, along with many other Big Finish titles. (This one was supplied for review, but I had already spent my monthly tokens on UNIT: Dominion and the fourth Doctor Lost Stories box set.) Season five puts a new spin on the format, thanks to the Doctor’s useless navigational skills. After taking the pair from 1893 to the New World and to Venus in a pair of very entertaining specials, the sixth Doctor dropped them off at home, but in the wrong century: they are now in 1968. These stories deliberately (as the special features explain) skip over their initial acclimatisation to the swinging sixties, to show them settled in their new lives, and ready for new adventures. Litefoot is working in an antiquarian bookshop, bought for him by Ellie Higson (Lisa Bowerman), a friend from the old days who has made the most of her vampiric longevity. Jago is on the verge of becoming a television personality, presenting an old-time talent show. Each of the four episodes lasts about an hour. All are by male writers, but Lisa Bowerman directs. Jonathan Morris writes “The Age of Revolution”, about a TV star, “Timothy Vee off the TV!”, and his peculiarly hypnotic statue. “The Case of the Gluttonous Guru” by Marc Platt is about the swami Sanjaya Starr, leader of the temple of Transcendental Meditation, who is looking for a host for Mama, the Great Birth Mother… “The Bloodchild Codex” by Colin Brake sees Ellie get skittish as another vampire shows up on the scene, looking for a book in Litefoot’s collection. “The Final Act” by Justin Richards confronts the pair with old enemies. Connections to the past are present throughout the stories thanks to the grand-daughter of the Great Godiva, Guinevere Godiva, who takes an uncommon interest in the crystal they brought back from Venus, and Detective Sergeant Dave Sacker, dogged descendant of another old friend. The four stories are all equally enjoyable, providing terrific dialogue for the two leads to wrap their wonderful voices around, with a sound mix that works just as well whether one is listening on earphones, a pillow speaker or a surround sound system – though obviously the latter was best. The audiobook also includes seventy minutes of special features. Stephen Theaker ****

Journey into Space: Frozen in Time, by Charles Chilton (BBC Audio/Audible) | review

This fifty-seven minute adventure is the fifth Journey into Space. The first three, Operation Luna, The Red Planet and The World in Peril, were long, episodic sagas broadcast in the fifties, while the last three, The Return from Mars, Frozen in Time and The Host were radio plays broadcast in 1981, 2008 and 2009 respectively. All were written by Charles Chilton, except The Host. As this story begins the usual crew of Captain “Jet” Morgan, “Doc” Matthews, Mitch and Lemmy are on their way back from Neptune in the Ares. The cast is all new except David Jacobs, who played several supporting characters in the original trilogy, often in the same scene, and here plays Jet Morgan. A problem with his cryogenic sleep unit meant Jet has been awake for practically the whole thirty-year trip home, and a good thing too or the ship might well have been destroyed. He wakes the others as they approach Mars, long-forgotten and short on fuel. They land near the Saviour 1, itself stuck there after developing a fault. Good thing Mitch is here, since in this distant future of 2013 it’s unusual for a crew to include an actual engineer. The media rep and the health and safety officer aren’t much good at fixing spaceships. The captain is now a “flight manager”, and Doc notes with bemusement how the remaining crew of the Saviour 1 spend all their spare time playing games on their screens. (If Charles Chilton could see us now!) They seem unwell, and there are clues to suggest that they’ve been up to no good... This story keeps the mood of the originals very well, remarkably so given the fifty years that had passed when this was produced, and that’s helped by the use once again of Doc’s diary entries to bridge narrative gaps. The crew all behave in recognisable ways, even down to the flashes of the old irritation with each other at times of stress. It’s just a shame that it stops after one hour, instead of ten. Stephen Theaker ****

Alien: Out of the Shadows, by Tim Lebbon and Dirk Maggs (Audible Originals) | review by Stephen Theaker

This full cast audio interquel places itself between two of the greatest science fiction films of all time, Alien and Aliens. That takes a good deal of ambition, but, then, it is adapted from Tim Lebbon’s novel by Dirk Maggs, whose CV, taking in everyone from Superman to Arthur Dent, shows he is not afraid of a challenge. We join Ellen Ripley (played here by Laurel Lefkow), sole human survivor of the Nostromo, as she records a message for her daughter and settles down for hypersleep. What she, and we, didn’t realise at the end of Alien was that murderous company android Ash had uploaded his consciousness to the escape pod’s computer. He hasn’t given up on his mission, and what’s worse he now sounds just like Rutger Hauer, having scraped together a new voice from what’s available in the computer system. He changes their course, taking them to LV178, a mining planet where he suspects the alien xenomorphs might be found. And he’s right. The miners disturbed something on that planet, and now, like Dracula coming to Whitby, it’s on its way up to the orbiting Marion in a shuttle. Chief engineer Chris Hooper (played by Corey Johnson) and the other surviving miners will need the help of Ripley if any of them are to survive, but the presence of Ash is just going to make things worse.

As well as the films, there have been a lot of good Aliens comics and games, and this adaptation shows how extremely well suited they are to the audio medium too, despite being fairly quiet, as monsters go. Characters talk over comms as they explore locations where the aliens might be lurking, and of course comms cut out as the aliens attack, creating a tension reminiscent of Journey into Space at its most frightening. The plot gives the characters some very difficult decisions to make, so the conversations never feel redundant. The record entries of the disembodied Ash are used cleverly to make sure listeners know exactly what’s going on in each of the ten chapters. (The Audible app’s new clips feature helps with this too.) One problem listeners may have is that a lot of what Ripley sees in this story seems to come as a surprise to her in the second film. Are we supposed to think that she kept that essential information from the colonial marines? Or is this a new timeline, branching off before Aliens? The story does answer these questions by the end, but not really in a way that’ll have anyone cheering. Nevertheless, this is a good, solid four-and-a-half-hour alien adventure that sounds terrific. It should satisfy anyone with a hankering for more of the galaxy’s second meanest bipeds. ***

Life, the Universe and Everything, by Douglas Adams (MacMillan Audio) | review by Jacob Edwards

Laughter beyond fits.

Life, the Universe and Everything is a remarkable book, and not just for the cosmic pull-tab placed so aptly on its front cover. Like its predecessors it is an existential satire with vast and brilliant ideas. Like its predecessors it projects human foibles onto the whole of creation, thence to bounce back in a fatalistic and absurdly funny manner. And like its predecessors it indulges in a digressive, facetious and distinctly Adamsey disregard for the sanctity of traditional prose narrative. Unlike its predecessors it isn’t really a Hitchhiker’s novel.

Capturing the internal zeitgeist of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is, of course, impossible. Almost everyone who’s read Adams has attempted at some stage to do so, and in almost all instances the attempt has proven at least moderately unwise. The person who came closest was – perhaps unsurprisingly, but then again perhaps not, given that he’d written Hitchhiker’s as a duology and that the story wrapped up rather neatly at the end of the second book – Douglas Adams. But even the man himself found it something of a strain to replicate the freewheeling, towel-toting, mind-blowing hoopiness of what he’d set down previously. Less a continuation, more an inspired adlib sucked into the ravenous vacuum of unfulfilled publishing contracts, Life, the Universe and Everything is nothing short of a jump-started series reboot; a greatly laboured-over extemporisation that nevertheless is, as mentioned, quite remarkable.

The full scope of Life, the Universe and Everything is difficult to impart without going into the sort of detail best served by reading the book. The basic storyline, however – the threads of plot used by Adams to connect the various dots and squiggles he’d laid down – is that of the people of Krikkit, a peaceful and isolated race whose sudden introduction to the wider universe provoked in them a xenophobic resolve to wipe out everyone who wasn’t them. Thus came the Krikkit Wars, at bloody culmination of which they and their planet were locked away in a Slo-Time envelope until the end of days. Unfortunately, a cohort of bat-wielding Krikkit robots escaped incarceration and have been roaming the galaxy, ruthlessly reassembling the Wikkit Gate, which is the key to releasing Krikkit from its temporal prison. Should they succeed, the aforementioned end of days will take place somewhat earlier than the rest of the universe would like…

Even for those who know nothing of a Doctor Who pitch that Adams wrote for the BBC during Tom Baker’s ascendency, entitled Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, this underlying concern of Life, the Universe and Everything seems rather more like a problem in need of solving, Doctor Who style, than the sort of thorny bewilderment that Hitchhiker’s regularly put out there for its quasi-heroes to blunder through, run away from or fail utterly to comprehend or even notice. Adams himself admitted to a certain frustration upon finding that none of his Hitchhiker’s characters were remotely qualified to play the part of the Doctor; yet he persisted and – remarkably – found a way to compensate for and even make a virtue of the dearth of players. Ever the innovator, Adams told the story almost exclusively by way of digressions. More on this shortly.

At the conclusion of the first two Hitchhiker’s books – and also the TV series – Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are left stranded on prehistoric Earth, wistfully resigned both to the future destruction of the planet and to never finding a satisfactory question to complement the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything. This is the natural endpoint of Arthur’s journey, and from the unused draft chapters collected in Jem Roberts’ Adams biography The Frood (Preface, 2014) it seems that Adams had tremendous difficulty writing him back into the story. He had, admittedly, done so once previously in Fit the Eighth of the radio series, but only through recourse to a second lightning strike from the infinite improbability drive. Having judged this unsatisfactory, Adams laboured until he came up with a wholly different deus ex machina solution, extricating Arthur and Ford from the antediluvian bathtub of prehistory and dropping them into the middle of Lord’s Cricket Ground just in time for the Krikkit robots’ first explosive appearance. Arthur subsequently travels in the Starship Bistromath (which is powered by restaurant physics), is abducted by Agrajag (a crazed bat-like incarnation of a creature whom Arthur has inadvertently killed many times over on the circle of life), learns how to fly (by throwing himself at the ground and missing), and faces off with a Norse god at an airborne party, none of which virtuoso pieces of Hitchhiker’s lore seem immediately germane to the subject of Krikkit. In fact, Adams appears almost resentful of Arthur’s lack of usefulness, and thus to be punishing him through a barrage of inventiveness that serves only to emphasise the qualities fostering that resentment. Arthur Dent, one of literature’s most passive protagonists, becomes also one of its most passive-aggressive antagonists. Meanwhile, the story itself refuses to unfold. Except…

Somehow, it does. Amidst digressions that seem merely nostalgic, digressions that loop about themselves and come back together like tied shoelaces, digressions within digressions, which transpire to be not just digressions but indeed crucial plot points hiding in brazen anticipation of the big reveal, somehow the story of Krikkit is told. (And by this we mean not just the backdrop of Krikkit – which Slartibartfast exposits shamelessly – but the actual story; the saga of Krikkit once wrested away from the Doctor Who canon and repurposed for Hitchhiker’s.) Arthur Dent remains totally ineffectual, Ford Prefect feckless and hedonistic, Zaphod a restless gadabout, yet through their free-floating conduit and surging by way of discursive slingshot, Life, the Universe and Everything takes on its own unique character. Adams, after dedicating the book, writes that it is “freely adapted” from the radio programme. The two words form at best an infelicitous understatement. In truth, and under cover of its irrepressibly zany content and an overly deliberate, at times predictable stylistic enunciation, the third Hitchhiker’s novel was entirely retrofitted.

Nowadays, there are several different manifestations of Life, the Universe and Everything to choose from, not least of all an audiobook read by Adams himself (from which was taken his outrageously apoplectic posthumous contribution to the third Hitchhiker’s radio series, voicing Agrajag with lisping, fang-tearing relish in Fit the Sixteenth). One such rendition that adds definitive nuance to Adams’ text is the 2006 audiobook read by Martin Freeman, who in 2005 had played Arthur Dent in the film version of Hitchhiker’s. Not only does Freeman exhibit a well-pitched array of character voices, he brings also a dash of his more assertive film persona to the narration, the story thus coming across almost as if filtered through the perceptions of a more rounded, more self-assured Arthur Dent. If Life, the Universe and Everything has garnered one particular criticism it is that, unlike the seat-of-the-pants exuberance of its much-vaunted predecessors, its word follies, for all their careful construction, feel inexplicably piecemeal. Freeman’s contribution goes a long way towards plastering over the cracks in the façade.

All told (and as frequently related in this review) Life, the Universe and Everything is a remarkable book. Perhaps not wholly remarkable – perhaps not reaching the fanciful heights of perhaps the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor – but remarkable nonetheless, and even more so as read by Martin Freeman. Thirty-four years on, pulling the ring-tab will still open to readers a novel of largely unparalleled zest.

Vince Cosmos: Glam Rock Detective, by Paul Magrs (Bafflegab Productions) | review

January 1972, and Poppy Munday (played by Lauren Kellegher) moves down to London, where she feels at first like she’s living in a movie. She moves in with a friend, but then struggles to find work, and her favourite pop star is shot while playing live on radio. Things are getting a bit miserable before she gets a frantic call from her mum back home: Poppy has won a competition to attend the launch of Galactic Cinders, the new album by her favourite, Vince Cosmos. He’s a lot like Bowie/Ziggy, full of facets and wearing make-up and feeling the zeitgeist and talking about the cosmic godhead. Weirdly, the creepy, angry little man who lives in the flat above hers is at the launch too. Is he there to assassinate Vince? This two-part story feels like a pilot, in that we’re a long time into the story before we finally get to spend time with Vince himself. I expected to love Julian Rhind-Tutt in this – he was brilliant as a similarly foppish character in the highly underrated sitcom Hippies – but somehow it doesn’t quite work, maybe because it doesn’t feel like he believes the more pretentious Bowie-like utterances of his character. He’s knowing when he should be oblivious. He does a good job with Vince’s songs, though, and by the end I wished that he’d been in it more. I also enjoyed the links to a classic piece of sf literature, and to the Brenda and Effie stories: the ventriloquist’s fuzzy bat out of hell shows up here at a royal variety performance, still in his pomp. Stephen Theaker ***

Doctor Who: Echoes of Grey, by John Dorney (Big Finish) | review

This sixty-seven minute play checks in with Zoe Heriot, now in her fifties after being returned to her own time by the Time Lords. They wiped her memories of her travels with the Doctor, leaving her with just the recollection of his visit to the Wheel in Space to fight the Cybermen, but she has an eidetic memory, and she can tell that there’s a discontinuity in her mind. It has made it difficult to form relationships; she feels like the ghost of herself. Then she meets Ally Monroe, whose life she apparently saved during one of the adventures she can’t remember. Ally thinks her alpha wave gadget will help, and slowly Zoe starts to remember the time she, Jamie and the second Doctor encountered the Achromatics, grey beings who declare their love for you while draining away your life. It’s a second Doctor story in the classic style, of slow-moving monsters in a confined space, with all the creepiness that brings. When they chase the Doctor around a room (he has a plan, but “no other ideas at all!”) it’s easy to imagine how it would have looked on screen. Wendy Padbury is as adept at voicing the Doctor and Jamie as when playing her younger self. The framing device is cleverly done, and by the time it ends the play’s title turns out to be clever too. It’s a good story, though its ramifications are potentially tragic: if Zoe and – as we’ve learned in other stories – Jamie have recovered some of their memories, did the Doctor make a terrible mistake in the Tomb of Rassilon? Stephen Theaker ***

Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, by Ian Marter (BBC/Audible) | review

The fourth Doctor, only recently regenerated and accompanied by journalist Sarah Jane Smith and U.N.I.T. medic Harry Sullivan, lands the Tardis on the Nerva Beacon. It seems to be abandoned, but further investigation reveals slimy trails, as if of a giant slug, and then freeze-dried humans, packed away in storage for thousands of years to survive a stellar disaster. The first humans to wake up suspect the Tardis crew of sabotage, a fatal distraction from their true, hidden enemies: the Wirrn, a race of giant locust-like insects with a grudge against humanity, and a gruesome purpose for these survivors. “The Ark in Space” was originally a television story, and this is the Audible version of the Target novelisation from the eighties, written by the actor who played Harry Sullivan. He wasn’t in the Tardis long, sadly, having been cast as the Chestertonian man of action, an entirely redundant position after Tom Baker took the role of the Doctor. It is read by Dead Ringers star Jon Culshaw, who first became famous for his wonderful telephone impersonations of Tom Baker’s Doctor. That ability makes him perfect for this audiobook, though ironically this comes from a time when the fourth Doctor wasn’t particularly funny – for much of this story he’s indistinguishable from his previous, rather serious, incarnation. He narrates in his own reading voice, and keeps the tension high. For a children’s book it is surprisingly gory, with talk of suppurating stumps and smouldering bodies welded to panelling after being repeatedly shot, and in the audio version there’s no bubble wrap to break the spell. Sarah Jane’s long, arduous and essential crawl through a narrow duct is as stressful as ever, no matter how many times we’ve already seen her succeed. The fate of one human infected by the Wirrn bears repetition in full: “with a crack, like a gigantic seedpod bursting, his whole head split open. A fountain of green froth erupted and came sizzling down the radiation suit…” There’s a reason these were my favourites as a child: other books were, quite literally, bloodless in comparison. Stephen Theaker ***

You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), by Felicia Day (Simon & Schuster/Audible) | review

This is the story of how a badly home-schooled violinist grew up to become a god among the virtual geeks. The face of Felicia Day will be familiar to many more people than actually know who she is; she had a spell as the background photo of some YouTube apps, she sang viral hit “Do You Want to Date My Avatar?”, and had eye-catching guest spots in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dollhouse (the episodes set in the future) and Supernatural, where her red-headed hacker is the fun kind of friend Sam and Dean badly need in their ever-tortured lives (the episode where they join her at a fantasy battle re-enactment is a classic). Understandably, this book focuses more on her own creative achievements, though it does give us a striking portrait of what it’s like to be a struggling (and then a doing-fairly-well) actor in Hollywood. Before that, and after an introduction by Joss Whedon in which he sounds remarkably like Ultron, listeners learn about Felicia Day’s childhood, where a miscalculated attempt to get out of some religious nonsense led to her mum withdrawing her from a good school, her education going badly astray from there until violin skills got her a college scholarship at the age of fifteen. Though fierce competitiveness made her the college valedictorian, she didn’t love the violin enough to make it her life, and so began her acting, and eventually a desire to write her own scripts. One of the most interesting parts of the book describes the support group of aspiring women she joined, and then constantly lied to about the progress on her script: the pilot episode of The Guild, which would eventually become a successful web series. It’s only after she comes clean about her fibs, and her addiction to World of Warcraft, that the dam breaks, the members of the support group become her producers, and the programme ends up a huge Xbox-endorsed success. It’s a good story, and it’s bracing to hear all the hard work that went into Day’s success, as well as all the failures that led up to it. Later in the book comes a dark period after she takes on too much, develops health problems, lets people down, and loses good friends, but there’s always the sense that she’s determined to do the things she wants to do, and any bumps in the road are eventually going to get flattened. The penultimate chapter is about her well-publicised run-ins with online boors, which events are all the more unfortunate given the positive light in which gaming (WOW aside) and the internet are seen throughout the book. Overall, it’s funny, rather inspirational, and sweet-natured, in a steely sort of way. The highlight, I think, is an excruciating scene where a fan recognises her in a build-a-bear workshop, leading shoppers who don’t know who she is to act as if she’s impudent for being recognised. Stephen Theaker ***

The Brenda and Effie Mysteries: Brenda Has Risen from the Grave, by Paul Magrs (Bafflegab Productions) | review

Effie might be in love, “in a whirlwind of amour” in fact, with a man named Keith, who has an elephantine proboscis upon his face. Brenda, former bride of Frankenstein’s monster, doesn’t like Keith, and that leads to a fall-out with Effie, who even stops opening her little shop. As she worries about her friend, memories return to Brenda of another old friend, Joseph Merrick, known as the Elephant Man back when they were in a travelling circus together. She was the Half-Dead Woman, who could let her stitches loose and horrify the crowds by wriggling her bits when they weren’t attached to each other any more. She was a callow young thing then, less than a century old, and just like Effie she didn’t listen to the advice of a well-meaning friend when she should have. What’s more, women were being killed back then, and they are dying now as well in a very similar way. It’s too soon for Brenda and Effie to go their separate ways. We learn much more about Brenda in this story (at least those of us who haven’t read more than one or two of the original novels yet). She has been in the course of her long life “a graverobber, a vagabond, a woman of ill repute, a warrior, a witch, a handmaiden to a queen, a sorcerer’s assistant, a lady pirate” and one suspects that isn’t all, but what she needs to be in this fourth story is a good friend, and perhaps she’s better at that than anything else. Another entertaining story, though it’s rather less light-hearted than earlier instalments. Stephen Theaker ***

The Brenda and Effie Mysteries: Spicy Tea and Sympathy, by Paul Magrs (Bafflegab Productions) | review

Brenda, former bride of Frankenstein, tells most of this third story while strapped to a table in the murky underground base of a villain. Her blood is being drained and infused with a special tea, in hopes of bringing a dried-up corpse back to life. The situation dredges from the depths of Brenda’s imperfect memory the events of a night in the fifties, when she worked as housemaid to Professor Tyler. He is one of the Smudglings, a group of fantasy writers much like the one frequented by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. One of their meetings was disturbed by the attack of a mummy, who made off with their best tea set and all of its contents. In the present day this is somehow connected with the Tipple teahouse (and massage parlour), owned by international traveller and explorer Professor Marius Keys, of whom Brenda says “everything about him speaks of quality and polish”, a phrase that would be even more apt in description of this series of audio plays. Anne Reid is terrific as Brenda, bringing both the sweetness and the toughness that the role requires, and the writing is a constant delight, full of detail, care, specificity, and ideas. Effie sounds uncannily like Sarah Millican, which makes me smile every time she speaks. From the moment the now familiar theme music plays, you know it’s going to be good. Stephen Theaker ****

Doctor Who: Solitaire (Big Finish) by John Dorney | mini-review

India Fisher plays Charley Pollard once again, for a story set during her time as companion to the eighth Doctor. He’s been turned into a puppet, and she doesn’t remember who he is anyway, or why she came into this toy shop in the first place. The owner, a toymaker, is creepy as heck, and a loud voice keeps shouting “PLAAAAY!” This is the twelfth story from series four of the Companion Chronicles, and is a play for two actors rather than the usual monologue by one (with other actors chipping in with their lines). David Bailie is marvellously ripe as the Celestial Toymaker, still smarting from previous defeats at the Doctor’s hands. Stephen Theaker ***

Doctor Who: Old Soldiers (Big Finish) by James Swallow | mini-review

The third story from series two of the Companion Chronicles is an hour-long adventure with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (played by Nicholas Courtney), who recalls an adventure that took place shortly after his decision to kill the Silurians, and perhaps explains his slightly less warlike approach in later stories. A UNIT base in Kriegeskind castle is plagued by the ghosts of ancient soldiers, who still have the power to kill. The Brigadier calls in the third Doctor, who parachutes into the place to help out. A bit reminiscent of The Ghosts of N-Space, but much better. Stephen Theaker ***

Doctor Who: Mother Russia (Big Finish) by Marc Platt | mini-review

The first story in season two of the Companion Chronicles. Peter Purves returns to the role of Steven, space pilot companion to the first Doctor. In this adventure the two of them and Dodo land in Russia, just as Napoleon prepares to invade, and a rogue alien complicates affairs. The plot requires Steven to be a bit dopey, but the Russia of 1812 is a fascinating setting and overall this really does have the feel of an authentic story from the Hartnell period. Stephen Theaker ****

Doctor Who: Helicon Prime (Big Finish) by Jake Elliott | review

Story two in the second series of Companion Chronicles. Frazer Hines plays Jamie McCrimmon, who shouldn’t remember anything of his adventures with the second Doctor, but for some reason he does, and he’s telling someone all about one of them. While Victoria is off studying graphology, the Doctor and Jamie land by accident on Helicon Prime, a luxury resort, booked up decades in advance and parked in a bit of space that keeps everyone unnaturally nice and peaceful. (It was moved there after visiting couples had shown a tendency, once they had a chance to relax and really think about things, to realise their mutual loathing and murder each other.) But someone must be immune, because there is a mysterious death, and then another, and now the Doctor’s got a real job on his hands. This story had some lovely incidental music that combined with the aliens and ambassadors to remind me quite a bit of Mass Effect. We get to hear how Jamie feels when the Doctor keeps him in the dark, and how he decides what to do in those situations. One dialogue exchange is as good as anything from the television series: “What are you thinking?” asks Jamie. “I don’t know, Jamie,” says the Doctor, “I haven’t finished thinking it yet.” Stephen Theaker ****

Doctor Who: The Catalyst (Big Finish) by Nigel Fairs | review

Louise Jameson returns to the role of Leela, the fourth Doctor’s second female companion. They visit Lord Douglas, who turns out to have travelled with a previous incarnation of the Doctor for several years and now has a secret trophy room full of mementos. His reasons for leaving the Tardis play an important role in the story. After initial frostiness, Leela warms up to Lord Douglas’s daughter, Jessica, who likes Rudyard Kipling and speaks with admiring horror of the suffragettes, and they discover that there is yet another secret within the trophy room, a secret with golden hair and wide, glistening eyes… The Doctor has taught Leela not to judge by appearances, but it’s a lesson Jessica may not get the chance to learn. This is the fourth story of the second series of the Companion Chronicles, and after listening to several of these in a row it’s hard not to feel the contrivance behind the various interviews and interrogations each companion must undergo. We’re grown-ups, could we not just agree to accept that Leela is telling us a story without a framing device? It’s also odd to hear a companion doing impressions. Sometimes it works well, but, as Louise Jameson acknowledges in an interview postscript to the story, her approximation of Tom Baker doesn’t quite work, sounding a bit like William Hague with a sore throat. Her Leela, though, is still fantastic, and the story gives her some full-blooded villains to chew on. Stephen Theaker ***