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. *****

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 ***

Elvenquest: The Complete Second Series, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Elvenquest: The Complete Second Series (Audible edition, 2 hr 46) by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto, sees the questers – Lord Vidar the elf, Dean the dwarf, Penthiselea the Amazon princess, Amis the chosen one (a former dog), and his owner Sam – unapologetically sent back to square one in their quest for the sword of Aznagar. It is once more abroad in the land! The subsequent adventures of this daft bunch are typically caused by their greed, lust, laziness and selfishness, and a general lack of appreciation for each other. Plots come second to jokes.

Meanwhile, villainous Lord Darkness, having made his way back to this world from another dimension, must recover his lost immortality, persuade bankers to lend him enough money to pay his mighty armies, and deal with personnel issues – the infernal horde find him a bit intimidating. His conversations with assistant Creech (similar to those of Blackadder and Baldrick) provide many of the programme’s funniest moments.

I really enjoyed series one, but my radio listening tends to be irregular and so I had missed series two till now. There is a cast change, Kevin Eldon taking over as Dean the dwarf, though in tribute to his mimicry I didn’t realise until seeing the cast list. It was as much fun as the first, and perhaps more, as the arbitrary nature of the quest becomes even more of a joke itself.

Like many of its fellow Radio 4 programmes (The News Quiz, Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, Just a Minute, The Now Show, etc), a strength of Elvenquest is the warm relationship between performers and audience. Pulled out and put on display some jokes would seem rather flaccid, but it’s hard not to laugh along when the audience is having such a good time.

It felt a bit daft buying the kind of programme that is so frequently repeated, but two or three listens later it’s clear my Audible token was well spent.

Doctor Who and the Pescatons by Victor Pemberton, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

It has been quite a while since I last dipped into the six-story collection Doctor Who: The BBC Radio Episodes. I began with the Jon Pertwee story The Paradise of Death, reviewed in these pages many years ago, and it wasn’t too bad. A bit later I listened to The Ghosts of N-Space, which was so painfully awful I couldn’t bring myself to review it, especially since that was shortly after the deaths of Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney and it wasn’t the right time to give their work a slating, however richly deserved. If you haven’t heard that story and you’re curious what was so bad about it, as an example let’s just say I never needed to hear the third Doctor explain the meaning of “sodomite” to Sarah Jane Smith.

Recently I’ve found that the new Audible iPad app is a very nice way to listen to audiobooks, and it’s kind enough to let you listen to non-Audible titles too, so I’ve been digitising and loading onto the iPad a lot of older audio adventures that got lost in the rush originally. Where those are ones I bought (for example the first eight in the Big Finish Companion Chronicles series, picked up in a sale), I may or may not review them, depending on whether I have time, but where (like this story) they were originally submitted for review and got stuck in the pile I will try to do the honours, though it’s a couple of years late. I don’t suppose anyone comes to this magazine/blog expecting timely reviews!

So, explanations aside, on to a short review of Doctor Who and the Pescatons (AudioGO, 1xCD, 46 mins; supplied by publisher), which was (the box says) originally broadcast on BBC Radio on 27 August 1993, but first existed as an LP in the seventies. This again features Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane, this time paired with Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor, making this a rare example of a spin-off featuring the current on-screen cast. It’s really more of a story told by the Doctor than a drama. Sarah Jane’s contributions are very limited, and the only other speaking part is Zor (Bill Mitchell), the leader of the baddies who pops up for a couple of scenes. The script is by Victor Pemberton, who had previously written the seaweed serial “Fury from the Deep”.

The plot concerns, you won’t be surprised to learn, the Pescatons, who are a shark-like species of aliens who can walk around on land using their flippers. Though their invasion of Earth is motivated by the need to escape their own doomed planet, there are few shades of grey here: the Doctor says this is a clash between two civilisations, one good (by which I think he means us), one evil (probably the Pescatons). The invasion leads to some terrifying sequences where Pescatons wander round London eating people up. The screams are so full-blooded you worry for the sanity of any children who got their hands on the LP! But I wish I had.

Looked at objectively, this story isn’t terribly good, but it is a great deal of fun and a fascinating product of its time. Given its short length I’m sure this won’t be the last time I listen to it. It’s just a shame that there are no songs! A fan of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds can’t help hearing the points in this story at which a disco beat might reasonably have kicked in, leading us off to new worlds of groovy Whovian fun. Justin Heywood singing for the Doctor, Sarah Brightman for Sarah Jane, David Essex for the Pescaton leader. It would have been glorious! But you can’t have everything. Someone should really get Tom Baker involved in a project like that: his brief contribution to Mansun’s Six shows how magnificent it could be.

Journey into Space: The World in Peril by Charles Chilton, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Journey into Space: The World in Peril (BBC Audio, digital audiobook, 10 hours; Audible purchase), written by Charles Chilton, is the third story in the saga of Jet Morgan and his crew, following on from Operation Luna and The Red Planet, both of which I adored. The CD release of this conclusion passed me by, so it was an utter delight to discover it on Audible.

The twenty-episode story begins with Jet (captain), Mitch (the engineer), Lemmy (the radio operator) and Doc (have a guess) arriving back on Earth after their disastrous Martian mission, with news of a possible Martian invasion. Put into seclusion to keep Martian agents from knowing they survived, and to prevent a panic, the boys kick their heels until a new mission comes their way: to go back to Mars. A fine reward!

Earth wants them to gather more information about the invasion, and, ideally, capture a Martian or one of the conditioned humans who serve them. The mission becomes urgent when strange planetoids appear in Earth’s orbit, and so after a brief sojourn on Luna while the ships are prepared it’s back to Mars for our heroes.

This is that rarest of treasures, the third in a trilogy that lives up to parts one and two. One of the true joys of Journey into Space is that it’s about characters who think very carefully. They chew everything over, consider every aspect and consequence of their decisions, argue intelligently with each other and their enemies, and are put into situations where careful thought is absolutely required and there’s plenty of time to do it. I envy the people who got to listen to this series when it first came out, though waiting a week between episodes must have been quite trying: every episode brings an exciting revelation, a brilliant set-piece or a deadly cliffhanger.

One particular tour de force is the episode in which, after an attack on Mars, Lemmy wakes up in absolute darkness, and must step by step work out where he is, why the ceiling is so low, why his feet can’t find any solid ground, if the rest of the crew are there too – and who the hell is that walking around the room with ice cold skin!

It’s hard to imagine I could have enjoyed this series more, but it does have one failing: the lack of female characters. That, the class relationships and the assumption that listeners will pay attention are the only things that date it. The journey into space is a very long one, but it’s highly rewarding, with an unexpected, perfect conclusion. Good work, Jet boy! (As Lemmy might say.)

Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, read by Mark Gatiss, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

I’ve lost track of how often I’ve read the Target edition of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks (AudioGO, digital audiobook, 3 hrs 3 mins; Audible purchase) by Terrance Dicks, but as soon as I saw this new reading by Mark Gatiss (with Dalek voices by Nicholas Briggs) it attracted the attention of my monthly Audible token. That voice! Imagine him reading this: “The cover illustration of this book portrays the third Doctor Who, whose physical appearance was altered by the Time Lords when they banished him to the planet Earth in the twentieth century.” In the first story of his fourth season, the third Doctor (with the help of his earlier selves) had won back the right to travel in time and space, but as usual flew straight into serious trouble. First came the drashigs, and then the incipient space war between the human and Draconian empires, a war engineered by the dastardly Daleks to pave the way for their invasion. This story begins with Jo Grant watching over the injured Doctor, the Tardis being sent by the Time Lords to Spiridon. She’ll soon venture out for help, and end up in the hands of its invisible inhabitants, but as the title suggests, this is no longer their planet. The Doctor will eventually wake and go looking for Jo, only to meet a squad of Thals, here to destroy a Dalek base at any cost.

The six original television episodes were scripted by Terry Nation, writer of the Daleks’ first appearance in 1963 (this story came ten years later), and the story is something of a throwback to those early days, with a lot of aimless running around in jungles. Structurally, it’s pretty much a remake of his first story for the programme, The Daleks. The Tardis is incapacitated, the companion falls ill and will die if not treated, the Thals are attacking a Dalek base. The Tardis interior is so tiny in this story that the Doctor exhausts its air in a matter of hours after the exterior is smothered by Spiridon’s plant life. Makes you wonder how its occupants survive when it is flying through space! The third Doctor is as dismissive of others as the first ever was: reunited with Jo after she’s been crawling around the Dalek base, he doesn’t let her speak, because there’s no way of course she could possibly have any important information for him.

But despite its flaws, there has always been something magical about this story for me: it’s Where Eagles Dare starring Doctor Who! Even now it seems unusual in being a sequel to a story from two Doctors before. And like many of the Pertwee-era stories, it benefits greatly from the Target novelisation: ironically, stories that were rather too long on television become quick-paced, action-packed adventures when compressed down to one hundred and twenty-five pages. This is a typical example, its three hours gripping in precisely the way that the six television episodes were not.

The audiobook includes fun sound effects and music stings, and Mark Gatiss’s narration is perfect, an absolute delight. Unless my memory is playing tricks, I once had a cassette copy of Jon Pertwee’s reading of the same book, and it surprises me to say I prefer this version. It’s unabridged, so that helps, but it always seemed odd to have the Doctor reading a text in which he was a character. As read by Gatiss, even the worst dialogue of the story (“I’m qualified in space medicine, I’ll do what I can for your friend”) becomes something to savour, and he tickles the listener with those words and phrases which adults may find amusing (the noise made by the plants splatting on the Tardis). However many times you’ve read the book or watched the episodes, this new audio version is well worth a listen.

Doctor Who: The Essential Companion – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Doctor Who: The Essential Companion (BBC/AudioGo, 2×CD, 160 mins), written by Steve Tribe and narrated by Alex Price, stitches together snatches of dialogue from the fifth full season of new Who, from The Eleventh Hour through to The Big Bang. It introduces us to the eleventh Doctor and his companions, Amelia (later Amy) Pond and Rory Williams, and then introduces them (or the Doctor and Amy at least, Rory often being dead, left at home, or erased from the space/time continuum) to countries built on space whales, daleks serving cups of tea, crashed spaceships full of weeping angels, alien vampires in Venice, the dream lord, silurians, Vincent Van Gogh, football and the Pandorica: all the things that made season five so wonderful.

The two CDs do an excellent job of summarising the storylines and celebrating the best lines, and every now and again the narration has a nice take on what’s going on. Those who have seen these episodes, surely its target audience, will find it serves as a pleasant reminder of the fun we’ve had, although my children have never got very far into it before asking to watch the actual episodes instead. For those who haven’t seen the programme, it might intrigue them to give it a try, but would spoil all the surprises. It’s all a bit pointless in an era when you can just load videos of the episodes onto an iPod and listen to them, but I can’t bring myself to dislike anything so full of wonderful dialogue, not least the “Hello Stonehenge!” speech, included here in full.

Dick Barton and the Paris Adventure – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

In a series of fifteen-minute episodes, Dick Barton and his chums work their way into the gang of black marketeer Spider Kennedy, who has a nasty habit of blowing up trains. Rather than the originals transmitted between 1946 and 1951, these are re-recordings produced for overseas transmission in 1949. Occasional line fluffs are not a problem, but do suggest these were recorded very quickly. Though there’s buzzing in places, the sound is good for such an old recording – particularly when it comes to the blood-curdling death screams.

Listening to the story over a couple of days, the accent Dick adopts in his guise as an American gangster begins to grate. Spider Kennedy quickly drops his own silly accent, but their initial meeting is unintentionally comical; think Vic and Bob as FBI agents. The story can be repetitive, the crooks becoming suspicious more or less every fifteen minutes, but the way Dick talks his way out of trouble is often quite ingenious. Its villains are colourful and menacing, if stereotypical (for example a lisping man Dick dubs “honeybunch”).

Though the story begins unpromisingly with a “half-wit” driving into a mine, it’s the now-historical setting of the story that modern listeners may find most interesting. It takes place against the background of post-war shortages, and when Barton goes to France, he notes that the operation is using the same beaches that were used for the D-Day invasion, and expresses surprise that there are any buildings left standing. That he uses the word invasion is interesting in itself.

The greater appeal, though, will be for fans of the character or the genre, and those who remember the story’s radio broadcast, all of whom will I imagine be delighted that these recordings exist at all. Those with only a passing interest in the material should probably listen out for an episode on Radio 4 Extra before buying.

Dick Barton and the Paris Adventure, by Edward J. Mason, starring Douglas Kelly. AudioGo, 4xCD, 4hrs.

Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead, read by Peter Davison – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

In the fifth Doctor’s first full adventure, he’s accompanied by Tegan and Nyssa; Adric is in the clutches of the rejuvenated Master. The Doctor’s fourth regeneration has not gone at all well, and he needs to rest. The recuperative properties of the zero room lost to a brush with the big bang, the Tardis heads for peculiar Castrovalva – which ultimately proves to be another of the Master’s traps.

Like Bidmead’s previous story, Logopolis, Castrovalva plays with lots of clever ideas: the zero room, recursion, Escher’s artwork and entropy. The original broadcast of the television version was, for a child, quite mind-blowing (and, years later, helped me get my head around first year philosophy). Freed from budgetary constrictions, the audio version achieves moments of real grandeur. Freed from acting constrictions, Adric, Tegan and Nyssa become almost three-dimensional.

There are also some very nice phrases – believing the Doctor dead in the Big Bang, the Master feels “deep intestinal satisfactions” – and lots of nice continuity touches. It’s perhaps a little humourless, some of the light touches that Davison brought to his on-screen performance not coming through on CD – he sometimes sounds as if he has a cold – but these things don’t spoil it. Castrovalva has its share of pompous and silly moments, but remains a surprisingly stimulating adventure.

Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead, read by Peter Davison. BBC Audio, 4xCD, 4 hours. This review originally appeared in BFS Journal #4.

Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

This audiobook begins with an explanation of how a history teacher and a science teacher came to be travelling through time and space with a grumpy old scientist and his fifteen-year-old granddaughter. Once listeners are up to date, we join the travellers as one by one they wake from unconsciousness, memories jumbled and lost, inside their time/space ship. Doors open and close, clocks melt, control panels give electric shocks. Before the mysteries can be solved the quartet must surmount their mutual distrust, but that won’t be easy. Ian and Barbara, the teachers, have been tricked by the Doctor before, on the planet Skaro, while young Susan explains that the Doctor too has been betrayed by friends in the past.

There have been many moments in the Doctor’s long life of which he would be less than proud: running dalek experiments on Jamie, ditching Sarah Jane Smith, quipping while a man died in an acid vat, and multiple dalek genocides. But this story set a bar for bad behaviour that wouldn’t be raised until the sixth Doctor tried to strangle Perpugilliam Brown. The Doctor here is quite the mad scientist. In the Sartrean play of argument and recrimination he behaves abominably from start to finish, curtly dismissing sensible suggestions, lying, being very rude about humans, and even drugging Ian and Barbara at one point. At the end, even an apology to Barbara turns into a bit of a lecture.

Nigel Robinson’s novelisation captures the eerie, fractious tone of the original episodes very well, and William Russell’s reading is, as with The Dalek Invasion of Earth audiobook, quite wonderful, his Doctor just as irascible as the narration describes him, his Ian, Barbara and Susan capturing their shifting moods. His introduction to CD3 is delightfully jaunty: “Disk threeee!” The music is well-judged, the soundtrack missing only a sprinkling of authentic Tardis sound effects. Overall, a sometimes gruelling but always gripping three-and-a-half hours for the listener. After all the theories and arguments, the solution when it comes is brilliantly bathetic. For Doctor Who fans this is an almost pure pleasure.

Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson, read by William Russell. Audiogo, 4xCD, 3hr20. Amazon UK. Amazon US. This review originally appeared in BFS Journal #3.

Doctor Who: The Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts – reviewed

It’s odd to hear the Doctor talking about capitalism, TV addicts, unemployment and the dole, but then the third Doctor, star of this five-part story, always stood out from the rest. He’s joined here by the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith, and given that we lost both actors so recently it was lovely to hear Nicholas Courtney and Elisabeth Sladen performing with Jon Pertwee in what was to me a brand new adventure (it was originally broadcast on Radio 5 in 1993). The Doctor and UNIT, soon after the affair of the dinosaur invasion, investigate a new tourist attraction, Space World, which features alien animals and ER – not just virtual reality, but experienced reality (think the tapes in Strange Days). The action soon follows space stowaway Sarah Jane to Parakon, a world where hoity-toity types live the high life thanks to the miracle plant rapine. A kindly President (played by Maurice Denham!) is being manipulated, revolution is brewing, and of course the Doctor and his friends get stuck in.

I wish I could say the story was as good as these beloved actors deserved. It wasn’t, quite, but that didn’t affect my enjoyment of it too much. Barry Letts’ script is notably waspish, seemingly full of bourgeois spite for both the effete upper classes – embarrassing new companion Jeremy Fitzoliver, for one – and the “lower lower class morons”. Episode two features one of the silliest resolutions to a cliffhanger this side of King of the Rocket Men: the Doctor simply jumps up from the autopsy table after being killed by a 200 foot fall. “Dead? Oh was I?” he asks. “Yes, well clearly I’m not now.” (Funny that the third and tenth Doctors could survive such falls, but not the fourth – put it down to entropy.) The sound effect that introduces the ER tapes is intensely irritating. But I can forgive a story a great deal if it puts the Doctor in a gladiatorial arena and the Brigadier at the head of a revolution. The overall effect is of a typical late Pertwee-era story given a Flash Gordon budget.

This story comes in an excellent box set, Doctor Who: The BBC Radio Episodes, which contains another three Sarah Jane stories – The Pescatons, The Ghosts of N-Space and Exploration Earth – as well as Slipback, starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, and Whatever Happened to... Susan? starring Jane Asher as the Doctor’s granddaughter.

Doctor Who: The Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts, starring Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney. AudioGo, 2xCD, 2hrs25. Amazon UK. Amazon US. This review first appeared in the BFS Journal #3. 

Journey into Space: The Red Planet, by Charles Chilton – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The Red Planet was the second series of Charles Chilton’s Journey into Space; twenty episodes, here spread over ten CDs with notes researched and written by Andrew Pixley, that were originally broadcast weekly from August 1954 to January 1955 on the BBC Light Programme. Though for this listener the adventure took a single week rather than twenty, its epic qualities seemed undiminished.

The first eight episodes detail the journey from Earth to Mars, a trip punctuated by much eerier incidents than expected; this is science fiction in the vein of The Quatermass Experiment rather than Flash Gordon. "Orders must be obeyed without question at all times" is the refrain of James Whitaker, who gives everyone the willies, but from where do his orders come? By the time Jet Morgan (played by Andrew Faulds) and the surviving members of the expedition reach their destination they've been well and truly frightened, even if it barely shows behind their stiff upper lips. On Mars it gets stranger yet, with hallucinations and... humans? Yes, the people we meet on this ancient, worn-out Mars in the latter half of the serial are humans, snatched from Earth whenever the two planets were at their closest. Most are in trances, believing themselves still on Earth at the time they were snatched. The mysterious flying doctor, however, seems to know just where he is. But who is behind it all? And will the surviving astronauts really have to settle down to life on Mars?

Though the mission is led by Jet Morgan, the most notable character is perhaps Lemmy (David Kossoff), the resourceful radio operator and engineer which the liner notes say was based on writer Charles Chilton (in a short interview with Chilton on the tenth CD you hear strong echoes of Lemmy’s voice). The same notes reproduce a letter to the Radio Times where K. Camm of Stevenage describes Lemmy as "an improbable space traveller, not to mention electronic engineer", but so far as I could tell the only reason for thinking that is his London accent. Lemmy shows himself time and again to be capable, intelligent and an exceptionally useful member of the expedition. It's easy to see why he was popular with listeners. It’s a shame the other characters sometimes sound a bit patronising when they talk to him - and sometimes completely ignore him! - but well done to Charles Chilton for getting a working class man on board. (Even in the mid-sixties there was resistance in the BBC to having characters with regional accents in Doctor Who.)

Listening to The Red Planet was a total delight. Tense, dramatic and detailed, it's grown no less riveting with the passage of time (at least I’m guessing it hasn’t - if I’d heard it in the fifties I suppose I might have enjoyed it even more!). Like the humans Jet Morgan finds on Mars, it doesn’t seem to have aged, though the credit should go to Ted Kendall, who has restored and remastered the episodes for CD, rather than ancient Martian science! Thanks to an accidental membership of Audible, I also have Journey into Space: Operation Luna tucked away somewhere, so I'll be on my way to the Moon just as soon as I find a spare week. Readers are recommended to join Jet and Lemmy on their trip to Mars at the earliest opportunity.

Journey into Space: The Red Planet, by Charles Chilton. AudioGo, 10xCD, 10 hrs 10 mins.

Doctor Who: The Hounds of Artemis, by James Goss, read by Matt Smith and Clare Corbett – reviewed

Eastern Turkey, 1929! And when the lost Tomb of Artemis is unsealed, what treasures are found within? The eleventh Doctor and Amy! Making their excuses and presenting themselves as emissaries from the Scarman Institute, they join an archaeological team on the verge of unleashing an ancient curse that is all too real.

We learn what happens along with Helen Stapleton, granddaughter of Bradley Stapleton, a junior member of the team who went on to great things. The Doctor has sent her a bundle of papers, combining his notes on the affair with the diary entries of Miss Amelia Pond; the former are read to us by Matt Smith, the latter by Clare Corbett, in her role as Helen.

It’s a bit of a shame that the diary entries aren’t read by Karen Gillan, but Corbett hits just the right note, and Matt Smith as ever is breathtakingly good as the Doctor; he shares Tom Baker’s knack for making the most eccentric line readings sound perfectly natural. Just listening to him read is a delight.

Like The Jade Pyramid and The Runaway Train, this story puts the Doctor and Amy in an interesting historical milieu, one familiar from fiction and films, but more or less new to the series. There are echoes of Tomb of the Cybermen, but despite a number of fatalities and much howling in the night the tone is generally jaunty and light-hearted.

It’s probably not the entity calling itself Artemis or its demonic hounds that will stick in the mind, but rather the incidentals of the story: the Doctor’s attempt to persuade Amy to join the digging (“Go away and let me diarize!”), Amy’s unpleasant experiences with a corset, and the Doctor’s need at one point to get his hands inside that corset.

A solid, entertaining adventure enriched by two fine performances.

Doctor Who: The Hounds of Artemis, by James Goss, read by Matt Smith and Clare Corbett. AudioGo, 1×CD, 70 mins.

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Terrance Dicks – reviewed

The first Doctor and his original companions, Barbara, Ian and Susan, land in a strangely quiet bit of London. Susan quickly gets the Tardis buried under rubble and twists her ankle, and forced to search for help they find Robomen, resistance fighters, bravery and love in a world that has been systematically dismantled by the Daleks.

In a moment of over-enthusiasm, I once described Terrance Dicks as “the English Hemingway”. I always felt his Doctor Who novels were storytelling boiled down to its barest, most direct essentials, lacking the frills and lace of other novels – descriptions, for example! Of course that’s because he wrote them very quickly from scripts, but, still, for many of us his books were an essential stepping stone to the grown-up section of the library.

This is one of his best adaptations, and it’s one of the best Doctor Who stories: a classic, archetypal tale of alien invasion by Terry Nation that deserved much better than 44th in the DWM reader poll – and it’s read by one of my very favourite actors from the show, William Russell, so there was little chance of me giving it a bad review!

The music’s a bit loud in parts, but that’s my only criticism. With Russell in his eighties now, at first it sounded odd when he affected an older voice for the Doctor’s lines, but before long I was loving his interpretation. His reading of the novel is wonderful throughout, and as ever Nicholas Briggs excels; you can almost hear his glee at the thought of performing similar duties on other Dalek classics.

This was four hours of sheer pleasure. It did something no other CD had managed for two years: kept Portishead’s magnificent Third out of my stereo for more than a couple of days!

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Terrance Dicks, read by William Russell with Nicholas Briggs. BBC Audio, 4xCD, 4hr10. Amazon UK. Amazon US. This review originally appeared in the March 2010 issue of Prism, the newsletter of the British Fantasy Society.

Doctor Who: Hornets’ Nest 3 – The Circus of Doom, by Paul Magrs – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The fourth Doctor continues his adventures in the Hornets’ Nest saga. This time Mike Yates is stuck in the cellar, listening as the Doctor spins a tale of a trip to June 1832, and an evil circus which spirits people away from their families. One such is trapeze artist Francesca, the sister of Dr Adam Farrow (Michael Moloney). “Are you saying your sister ran away with the circus?” asks the Doctor. “How wonderful! I always imagined doing that when I was a boy. We didn’t get many circuses visiting, though.” But the ringmaster of this circus is the willing possession of a race of intelligent alien insects, and an even greater obstacle is the Doctor’s own knowledge of a tragedy that must surely come to pass. Even as he begins to take the measure of his new enemies, he starts to feel that he is falling a step or two behind.

Paul Magrs gives the Doctor a stream of wonderful dialogue in this episode – “I’m no strange man, I’m the Doctor, and I don’t like to see people looking scared…” – and Tom Baker’s line readings are as surprising and vibrant as ever. It’s worth the fiver or so this CD costs just to hear the relish with which he says “bearded lady”. Macabre and funny, this is some of the best-written Doctor Who out there; for example the Tardis materialises with a “cheery brouhaha”. It’s a taste of what a Tom Baker series might have been like with the production values of the David Tennant era. Sadness comes with the thought that the Brigadier was originally intended to be the Doctor’s partner in these stories. Richard Franklin holds the ground, but these would have made a superb final outing for his commanding officer.

Doctor Who: Hornets’ Nest 3 – The Circus of Doom, by Paul Magrs, read by Tom Baker and others, BBC Audiobooks, 1×CD, 70 mins. Amazon US. Amazon UK.

Doctor Who: Hornets’ Nest 1 – The Stuff of Nightmares, by Paul Magrs – reviewed

Here the BBC manage what Big Finish never quite could: persuading Tom Baker back to the role of the Doctor [or at least they hadn't when this review was originally published in Prism – well done Big Finish!]. This is a post-Fendahl Doctor who apparently looks just like he did in the seventies (which could well mean he looks like Jon Pertwee, depending where you stand on UNIT dating).

Considering this teams Paul Magrs and Tom Baker, known respectively for their eccentric novels and performances, this feels awfully old-fashioned, almost reined in. If anyone was going to provide Baker with the talking cabbages he craved, you’d have put money on Magrs, but not this time. We do get the Doctor as hermit, though, another Baker suggestion rejected by the TV production team. He’s keeping watch on a cottage filled with stuffed animals that occasionally attack him. Why? That’s the story he begins to tell Mike Yates.

Disappointingly, this isn’t an audio drama, but rather, as it says on the back cover, “a multi-voice adventure”. First Mike Yates tells the story of how he found the Doctor, then the Doctor tells the story of how he got stuck in the cottage. Bits here and there are dramatised, but it’s more like an audio book, of which this CD comprises just one of five parts, than a Big Finish production.

That’s a shame, in that Tom Baker sounds most like the Fourth Doctor during the exchanges of dialogue, and least like him when narrating the story. It’s hard to imagine the restless, impatient Fourth Doctor sitting in one chair long enough to tell such a long story! Perhaps here we’re meeting the side of the Doctor who sits down to write in those five-hundred-year diaries. As narrator, he’s largely unable to deliver the exciting line readings that were such a feature of his performance as the Doctor.

But the times when he does are the high points of the CD, and Magrs gives him some great material: lines like “What had I smoked out of the badger’s head?” or “I opened up the badger’s brain using very tiny brain scissors.” Even when it doesn’t sound much like the Fourth Doctor, it’s still Tom Baker, and listening to him read a new Doctor Who story of any kind is a pleasure of the very first order. As long as you come to this expecting a reading rather than a play you should go away happy.

Doctor Who: Hornets’ Nest 1 – The Stuff of Nightmares, by Paul Magrs, read by Tom Baker and others, BBC Audio, 1xCD. Amazon US. Amazon UK. This review originally appeared in Prism, the newsletter of the British Fantasy Society.

Doctor Who: The Last Voyage – reviewed

In this two-CD adventure the tenth Doctor lands upon what appears to be a spaceship, but is actually an Interstitial Transposition Vehicle. He’s barely aboard before almost everyone disappears. His goal (as usual!) is to gather the survivors, work out what’s going on, convince them he isn’t to blame, and save them from disaster. In this he’s helped by Sugar McAuley, a flight attendant – or rather, “comfort mediator” – whose lashtop computer will prove very useful later on. But before getting better, things get worse: passengers start to hear their names being whispered, strange beings seem to snatch them out of reality, and when they reach their destination things don’t improve at all.

This was a nicely-written adventure read very well. The setting gives David Tennant several very different characters to get stuck into, and he mostly does a great job, though I found his Sugar McAuley a little rougher on the ears than Liverpudlian Layla in Dead Air; I didn’t look forward to her dialogue, and there was quite a lot of it. At times the Doctor’s own dialogue feels like a run-through of this Doctor’s greatest hits – “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry”, “Well... Well...” and other Tenth Doctor stand-bys get a run-out – but I doubt fans will complain about that; I won’t.

Doctor Who has a long, proud history of pilfering its plots from the best, and the main plot of this one felt a little too close to Stephen King’s The Langoliers for me to be completely enamoured. But I did enjoy listening to it. The story has several neat ideas, from those lashtops to the nature of the spacecraft itself, and the way the Doctor manages to fix it. There are some great sound effects, some good mysteries, and a bunch of interesting characters. It’s not a dud by any means, but not quite a classic.

Doctor Who: The Last Voyage, by Dan Abnett, read by David Tennant. BBC Audio, 2xCD, 133 mins. Amazon UK. Amazon US.

Doctor Who: Dead Air – reviewed

Due to the tardiness of my reviewing, this takes us back to the days of David Tennant in the Tardis. It seems like so long ago, but the passage of time is quickly forgotten as the reading begins. A recording found on the wreck of a pirate radio ship has been restored, and this CD is the result. The voice on the tape is that of the tenth Doctor, travelling alone post-Donna. Radio Bravo was infested by a rather nasty entity called the Hush, and the Doctor followed it there.

This is essentially The Boat That Rocked crossed with The Thing. The crew are an assortment of DJs from the dawn of time: Tommo, smooth Jasper, Liverpudlian Layla. One by one they fall prey to the Hush, the story putting the surviving characters in situations where it is often difficult to tell when the switch has been made. It’s up to the Doctor to find a clever way of stopping it, but is he quite as clever as he thinks? And this CD that I’m listening to, was it really a good idea?

Of the Who CDs I’ve listened to lately, this wasn’t my favourite, the broad characters and accents of the pirate DJs clashing somewhat with the serious and frightening plot. I enjoyed the way that the CD itself was worked into the plot, and the story exploited its status as an audio adventure very well – it wouldn’t have worked in any other format – but it just didn’t excite me. David Tennant’s reading is committed and sincere, but we don’t see any new facets to his characterisation or performance.

Not bad, but not great either. It was really good to hear David Tennant as the Doctor again, though.

Doctor Who: Dead Air, written by James Goss, read by David Tennant. BBC Audio, 1xCD, 70 mins. Amazon US. Amazon UK.

Doctor Who: The Runaway Train – reviewed

"Farmland? Do I look like a landowner? I live in a blue box, for goodness' sake!" roars the Doctor at a would-be employee, the story capturing from the off the eleventh Doctor's particular brand of oddness. He might need a bit of help digging up an alien artefact, but "that is hardly a job that merits a farmland-based reward!" Matt Smith gets some lovely dialogue to work with in this Wild West audio adventure and throws himself into it with glee. It's unfinished railroads, Confederates and Yankees, and alien McGuffins, giving Smith the chance to try his hand at several accents, with more than decent results. I confess to a peculiar fondness for his version of Amy Pond, sounding as it does so very much like Sylvester McCoy.

I never feel qualified to comment on the quality of Doctor Who stories since I believe, on a fundamental level, that any story featuring the Doctor is by definition better than one that does not. But even through rose-tinted glasses this seems like a good one. The Doctor has lots of fun, Amy gets a good slice of the action, and the adventure is topped and tailed by the kind of timeline tricksiness that is very much a part of the current era. Readers with children may be encouraged to learn that the story doesn't have quite the ominous – nay, terrifying! – tone of many Who audio adventures: for once my youngest got all the way through without asking for a change of CD. Overall, a good story told with infectious enthusiasm.

Doctor Who: The Runaway Train, by Oli Smith, read by Matt Smith, BBC Audio, 1xCD, 65 mins. Amazon US. Amazon UK.