DIVERGENCE.

05. Doctor Who: ‘The Fearmonger’ by Jonathan Blum

Featuring the Doctor and Ace, played by Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred

One would-be assassin is in a mental ward. Another’s on the run. Their intended victim is stirring up the mobs. Terrorists are planning a strike of their own. A talk-radio host is loving every minute of it. A Whitehall insider whispers about a mysterious UN operative, with a hidden agenda. Everyone’s got someone they want to be afraid of. It’ll only take a little push for the situation to erupt - and something is doing the pushing. But you can trust the Doctor to put things right. Can’t you?

Doctor Who has an excellent tradition of pointing to extant flaws in British society and telling stories about them. In this case, the flaw in question should be obvious; the rise of Anglocentric and white-chauvinist political organisations, most particularly the British National Party. Back in the eighties, during McCoy’s years on television, the show’s writers tried to inject anti-Thatcher messages into the stories. Whether or not they succeeded is up for debate, but that tradition of political awareness is alive and well in this particular story.

Though still immature in execution, ‘The Fearmonger’ tells a nice, interesting and, for the most part, thrilling story. A woman named Sherrilyn Harper is running a BNP-esque political organisation. People are trying to kill her, terrorists are trying to kill people generally, and one talk-back radio host is content to let chaos reign so he can sit back and get rich and famous off of the turmoil. The Doctor and Ace have to put things right. Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy, of course, have some great chemistry, but the real standout in the cast is Jacqueline Pearce as Harper.

Adopting her best Thatcher, and with Jonathan Blum’s surprisingly nuanced writing behind her, Pearce prevents Harper from becoming the shrieking demagogue her name would suggest. Far from being a harpy, though, Sherrilyn Harper is an honest, hardworking woman who genuinely believes in the racist, fear-mongering, hate-filled swill she’s feeding the masses, and the masses are responding. In the 1990s, against the backdrop of the Clinton and Blair administrations in Britain and the United States, centre-left politics seemed to be on the ascendancy; by the time this audio was recorded, far-right politics was making its voice heard, and the audio reflects that.

The plot is structured in an interesting way, and we’re introduced to the story through a talkback radio show, which the Doctor is using to try and communicate with a would-be assassin. The villain here isn’t all that interesting, and the story ends exactly the way you think it would end, but the character of Sherrilyn Harper is interesting enough to make this a worthwhile listen. This isn’t a romp, though. Some awkward questions about British society are raised, and for a fandom as obsessed with highlighting the positives of Britain and British society and downplaying whatever negatives there may be as Doctor Who’s, that might be a bit confronting.

6/10

06. Doctor Who: ‘The Marian Conspiracy’ by Jacqueline Rayner

Featuring the Doctor and Evelyn, played by Colin Baker and Maggie Stables

Tracking a nexus point in time, the Doctor meets Dr Evelyn Smythe, a history lecturer whose own history seems to be rapidly vanishing.

The Doctor must travel back to Tudor times to stabilise the nexus and save Evelyn’s life. But there he meets the Queen of England and must use all his skills of diplomacy to avoid ending up on the headman’s block…

The first story to introduce an original-to-audio companion, ‘The Marian Conspiracy’ presents a fairly standard historical, mercifully free of alien involvement. The plot’s fairly easy, really: Evelyn is vanishing from history, and she and the Doctor travel back in time to find out why. At first, they think they’re visiting the time of Elizabeth I, but have actually wound up during the reign of her sister, the doomed Mary I.

Underlying themes of religious freedom are present throughout, and though at times subtlety is sacrificed to make a point, they’re rather well-handled. Much better, I feel, is the story’s treatment of Mary I, not as the Protestant-burning Catholic firebrand so common in historical fiction, but as a woman of strong religious convictions who is simply desperate to become a mother. The pain of her phantom pregnancy is touched upon in a very even-handed and sensitive way, though the more controversial issues of her reign are not ignored. Indeed, though Evelyn lionises Elizabeth I, even she, in the end, acknowledges the tragedy of Mary’s own place in history.

The plot, then, is easy; there’s a conspiracy, Mary’s involved, Evelyn’s ancestors are involved, it’s up to the Doctor to make sure history keeps on course. Despite being one of the first audios to be released, ‘The Marian Conspiracy’ is solid and mature in every respect. An excellent place to begin the audios, particularly if you’re a fan of Colin Baker, as I most assuredly am. Better still, though, is the introduction of Maggie Stables as Evelyn Smythe, the Doctor’s newest companion.

This audio marks a rather impressive step for Big Finish with the introduction of Evelyn. A new companion, whose adventures would largely take place in the audio format, whose story arc and characterisation were entirely in the hands of the audio writers. For this alone, the story is worth a listen; the solid plot, historical flavour and interplay between Baker and Stables, who already seem to be hitting it off, just adds to the whole thing. Highly recommended for first time or new listeners.

7/10

52. Doctor Who: ‘Scherzo’ by Robert Shearman

Featuring the Doctor and Charley, played by Paul McGann and India Fisher

There were two friends, and together they travelled the cosmos. They thwarted tyrants and defeated monsters, they righted wrongs wherever they went. They explored the distant future and the distant past, new worlds and galaxies, places beyond imagining.

But every good story has to come to an end…

With no times or places left to explore, all the two friends have now are each other. But maybe that’s one voyage too many. Maybe they’ll discover things they’d rather have left undisturbed… hidden away in the suffocating, unfeeling, deafening brightness.

Once upon a time. Far, far away.

Following on immediately from the events of Zagreus, ‘Scherzo’ is an altogether smaller, quieter drama piece. Far from the all-star extravaganza that was Zagreus, ‘Scherzo’ leaves us with only two characters; the Doctor and his companion Charley, walking endlessly in a glass tunnel of pure, blinding light, hounded by… well, I couldn’t just tell you, that would give too much away.

The drama, here, is based entirely around the interactions between the two characters and they way they deal with their plight. The TARDIS is gone, they’re trapped in a universe that’s not their own and it seems as though there’s no way to get home. That’s plenty enough to deal with right there, but this universe seems intent on stripping everything else from them, too. The Doctor and Charley cannot see, taste, smell. They have, now, only each other.

India Fisher and Paul McGann turn in astonishing performances. Limited though the audio format is for actors, these two do an exceptional job conveying the horror and wonder of their new environment, and Charley’s anguished declarations of love really tug on the heart strings. The concept is, for the most part, novel, and just as you’d expect from the author of televisions ‘Dalek’, just about pitch-perfect. Perhaps the best aspect of this story is that it can only work for Paul McGann’s Doctor and India Fisher’s Charley; only their chemistry, only the unique nature of their relationship, allows this piece to function. And function it does. It thrives, as a matter of fact.

Breaking up the main action of the play (though action doesn’t seem like the right word—the characters spend most of their time just walking through whiteness and talking) is an allegorical narrative presented as a fairytale told by Paul McGann. This play-within-a-play does a lot to underline the thematic flavour of the story, though sometimes at the cost of subtlety. In the end, though, the play could just be an ode to the nature of the Doctor’s companion: a hand to hold, even when there’s nothing else left.

10/10

88. Doctor Who: ‘Memory Lane’ by Eddie Robson

Featuring the Doctor, Charley and C’rizz, played by Paul McGann, India Fisher and Conrad Westmaas

No summer can ever quite be as glorious as the ones you remember from when you were young, when a sunny afternoon seemed to last forever and all there was to do was ride your bike, eat ice-lollies and play with Lego. Tom Braudy is enjoying just such an afternoon when the TARDIS lands in his Nan’s living room and interrupts her in the middle of the snooker. 

After they’ve apologised, the Doctor and his friends soon discover matters of far greater concern than the fact that their time machine is blocking Mrs Braudy’s view of a thrilling century break. The street which Tom happily cycles up and down appears to have no beginning or end, and every single house on it is identical. 

Is this the future of suburbia, or something even more sinister? Why doesn’t Tom look as young as he behaves? And can anybody remember which house the TARDIS is in?

‘Memory Lane’ is certainly not the best Big Finish audio that’s been put out, but it never tries to be. Relying on a few tried and true Doctor Who tropes, the story soldiers on, and never takes itself too seriously. Which is good, quite frankly, because it’s not a story that should be taken seriously.

The story begins with a man talking to an older lady. His grandmother. They chat about Lego, his grandmother makes the usual (and somewhat cliche) remarks about times having changed, and it all seems lovely. It all seems normal. There’s something not right about this scene of early twenty-first century British domestic bliss, however. The man sounds like a grown man, with a deep voice and all of that, and yet waxes lyrical about a Lego spaceship he’s just built. He goes on about the different kinds of space Lego available. And what he wants most, in the whole world, is an ice cream.

The story starts the way plenty of Doctor Who stories have. Everything seems normal, even if there’s something slightly off, and then the Doctor and friends arrive on scene and we can start to get to the bottom of the mystery. Though recorded in 2005, the story seems like it could easily come out of the last couple of series, and there are some ingredients that should be familiar to anyone who’s watched the show lately. A prison designed to conform specifically to the prisoner in question. A suburban street where strange happenings are afoot.

The villains in this story (spoiler alert) aren’t really villains at all. Just aliens with bizarre biologies which in turn produce bizarre understandings of the universe, which is fairly common in the Big Finish range. The human protagonists never really get a chance to stand on their own, and it seems as though there’s little for the Doctor or his companions to do. They get swept up in the story, and then the story happens, which isn’t so bad. After all, this is Doctor Who we’re talking about; in the end, the story just happens and we’re meant to sit back and let it.

It’s always good to hear Paul McGann as the Doctor, and he and his two companions have their usual chemistry, but C’rizz, as usual, suffers from an uneven characterisation. Everyone turns in an able, if fairly by the numbers, performance for an able, if fairly by the numbers, story. On the plus side, it was great to see a non-white British family portrayed; the Afro-Caribbean grandmother, who accepts the arrival of the TARDIS with barely an eyelash batted and greets the Doctor and his companions with an invitation to stay for tea, is one of the more refreshing secondary characters that’s come along in a while.

6/10