Find and Replace

Katy Manning is brilliant. Really, that should be a required t-shirt slogan for every single Doctor Who fan. Not content with playing that emblem of early seventies Britain, Jo Grant, she also had a pivotal role in creating the audio version of the wonderful Iris Wildthyme.

As she says in the short interview which follows on from the action in Paul Magrs' fantastic new Companion Chronicle, Find and Replace, when first playing Iris Peter Davison, playing the Doctor, asked in horror of her accent 'Are you really intending to play it like that?' and thank God she said yes, or we'd have missed out on so much. Without that broad Mancunian accent perhaps the character would have remained trapped in prose but with it she flew until that voice is now the one that I hear when reading Iris' adventures, a the defining characteristic of Miss Wildthyme.

Which means that the combination of Katy playing Iris, Jo and the Third Doctor in Find and Replace is a dream come true for someone like me who adores all three and views the seventies as the high-spot of British television. Throw in the best writer of modern Doctor Who penning the script and, frankly, I'm in genre heaven.

Make no doubt about it, Find and Replace is the best single Big Finish release bar none since Magrs' earlier Ringpullworld and demonstrates that, when the company uses the very best talent available, it's capable of creating stories on a par with any genre work in any medium anywhere.

The acting is, of course, superb. Katy is astonishing, at times switching smoothly from Jo's winsome little girl voice, to Iris' barking Lancashire to Pertwee's patrician tones in the space of a few seconds. That Alex Lowe as the novelisor Huxley is in no way embarrassed by such a tour de force performance is indicative of his quality too, but both actors are helped immeasurably by the quality of Magrs' script, which flows and eddies as smoothly as a pint of Guinness, sliding from nostalgic reverie as Jo imagines the Doctor moving about in his lab directly above her, to unexpected confrontation as...well, you better listen to it yourself really :)

There's a very genuine sense of sheer pleasure in every aspect of Find and Replace, a very real feeling that everyone involved is having a whale of a time, best summed up by the triumphant whoop of 'Let's go back to the Seventies!' which ends part one. Credit for some of this must presumably go to director Lisa Bowerman, who contrives to keep everything moving along and to avoid the temptation to clutter the sound-scape with intrusive background bells and whistles (unlike some of the other BF directors).

Hugely recommended.

Iris Season 2 Box Set

The quickest of plugs for something very dear to my heart: Big Finish have now released the artwork for the utterly fabulous looking and sounding Iris Wildthyme season 2 box set.

Consisting of all four of the new season stories, and with each disc also coming with Anthony Dry's Official Best Ever Artwork, the box set is available for pre-order from Big Finish now at a fairly sizeable discount compared to buying them individually!

I've read two of the stories and they're brilliant (and I can't believe that Messrs Wright and Scott will have allowed either Simon Guerrier or Mark Magrs to turn in anything less good than that).

There's nothing not to like here - go and buy them now, and whet your appetite for the plethora of Iris related...well, stuff due out this year.

Two Plays

The Zygon Who Fell To Earth - Paul Magrs

Story

The Doctor and Lucie bump into Auntie Pat (from 'Horror of Glam Rock'), only in the 80s this time rather than the 70s. And she's married to an ex-muso named Trevor, who turns out not to be entirely what he seems...

Great Bits

* "I wandered lonely as a clown"

* Mimms the Gay Zygon with his slight stirrings of human emotion.

* "Palpate her cybernetic dugs"

* Auntie Pat not being fussed that Trevor is a Zygon and giving the Doctor a row for lumping all Zygons together

* "I've gone native"

* "Change your form if you're going back to reception"

* "Certainly not, I was always like this"

* "Or as you know him...TREVOR!"

Minor Disappointments

It's a shame that "Sting him, sting him to death" didn't end "sting him vewwy hard" like Life of Brian.

Major Disappointment that turned out not to be

And I was just thinking that the end was a bit flat with [SPOILER] selfishly coming back - then felt a right halfwit at the strangely moving final revelation.

Major Disappointment that you can only blame Nick Briggs for

This was going to be called Trevor of the Zygons, which may well be best Who title ever. Nick 'No Talent' Briggs pooh-poohed the idea however.

Conclusion

As a sort of sequel to last year's Horror of Glam Rock this fits comfortably into the first of Magrs' two basic approaches to Big Finish plays - the essentially light-weight and silly but with an undercurrent of 60s northern soap opera strand (I know that's quite convoluted for a 'basic' strand).

Full of whimsy and packed with genuinely funny dialogue, if you liked the earlier play you'll love this.

And with Tim Brooke-Taylor molesting a Skaresen, what's not to love?


The Boy that Time Forgot - Paul Magrs

Story

With the TARDIS stolen, the Doctor and Nyssa try to use a seance to get it back - only to end up a long, long time ago in the presence of an old, old friend...

Great Bits

* the basic premise of the story

* an Alternative Universe that's actually interesting and whose existence has consequences.

* the Cliffhanger to part one.

* "I've never been taken up the Limpopo. I've never braved the inhospitable bush"

* the names of the various Scorpions

* the way in which Nyssa gradually realises that the old, old friend is still an absolute arse.

* Andrew Sachs. He's very, very good.

Minor Disappointments

The sacrificial death of one character may be customary but I was still disappointed when it happened near the end of the final part of this play.

Major Disappointments

Actually, thinking about it, that death may count as a major disappointment.

Major Disappointment that you can only blame Nick Briggs for

Exile. Ok, so it has nothing to do with this but just how inept, juvenile and crap was Exile*? And the rest of the Unbounds were so good, as well.

Conclusion

It's about as unexpected a comeback as you're likely to get in Doctor Who, on a par with bringing Ivy back to Corrie.

And yet it works.

By turns funny, clever, silly, sad and moving this is the perfect exemplar of the second strand of Magrsian audios for Big Finish: the relatively serious story which plays about just enough with the series' history (see also the excellent sixth Doctor offering, The Wormery).

There's not much I can say about it without spoiling it completely (I may already have gone too far, I think) so just go and buy a copy and give it a listen.

Unbelievably, it's so good that it tempted me into getting the previous Davison audio. Maybe this could be the play to bring me back to the BF fold**?

* Whatever the otherwise reliable Rob says
* *I really hope not - the Classic Series figures are taking up all my money as it is

After Blake Part 1

[or what I thought of the audio play 'Mark of Kane' which continues the Blakes 7 story]

War Crimes

From this remove, Alan Stevens and David Tulley's War Crimes comes across as pretty schizophrenic. With its purpose being to fill in the background for Travis' betrayal of humanity to the Andromedans, it would seem to be aimed specifically at the hardcore Blakes 7 fan and yet barely five minutes go by without one character or other info-dumping all over the tape.

In short order, for instance, Travis explains what Central Control (why not call it Star One?) is in torturous detail, then follows it up by talking about Klein aka Docholli aka Masterton without bothering to give even a vague idea of who he is. An joke about Bayban the Butcher follows directly on from the action stopping so that a supporting character can spell out to Travis exactly why he's wanted by the Federation, as though he didn't actually know (and this in itself is a fannish continuity fix designed to show that Travis was responsible for both the massacre on Zircaster and the one on Auros, thereby clearing up an apparent contradiction between the TV episodes 'Seek-Locate-Destroy' and 'Trial').

If the play seems unsure of its audience, the primary sub-plot (if something so flimsy could be called something so concrete) simply makes matters worse. As he tries to corner Blake, Travis first allows one of his blood-sucking Mutoids to become dangerously low on serum and then reveals that the weakening Mutoid is in fact the remnant of the widow of the surgeon who saved Travis' life after Blake shot him (the sheer clumsiness of that sentence exemplifies the unnecessarily convoluted nature of the relationship). That established, Travis allows the Mutoid to replenish herself whilst briefly expressing disappointment that she has no emotional link to the surgeon, who Travis is keen to exonerate in her eyes from accusations of treason to the Federation.

This is presumably intended - along with another scene where Travis explains that he never betrayed Kline/Docholli because he too was once in the military - to show that Travis has his own code of honour and then contrast that with his betrayal of the entire human race. But if so, the play is too brief and the pertinent moments too trite to convince.

The acting is generally fine, except it takes Brian Croucher as Travis about half the play to warm up and stop sounding as though he's reading directly from the script. Croucher, like Paul Darrow, has a fairly flat intonation anyway so it's not quite as distracting as it might be with a more flamboyant actor, but it's not ideal.

Friendly Fire

If War Crimes seemed unsure of its audience, the linked second play, Friendly Fire is aimed squarely at the most rabid of Blakes 7 fans. Peppered with minor continuity references and fannish in-jokes, it should be a guilty pleasure for those likely to be listening, but instead it ends up a mishmash of missed opportunities and self-indulgent writing.

These problems are evident from the very beginning. In only the second scene, Blake (played as excellently as ever by Gareth Thomas) enquires after a bounty hunter named Kane who is described to him as tall with a false hand containing a built in weapon and what sounds like an artificial eye. We quickly find out that it's not in fact Travis, but what could have been a decent bit of audience misdirection by the authors is completely wasted by the fact that in the first scene Kane is introduced and is clearly not played by Brian Croucher.

To be honest, and not wanting to be cruel because Alan Stevens and David Tulley are much better writers than these two plays suggest, Friendly Fire sounds for all the world like Blakes 7 as written by Gary Russell. Like Russell's series of dreadful novels and plays for Big Finish, the humour is forced and hackneyed:

TANDO: I 'ate sharkas... sarcum... er... shack... eh... people bein' clever like.

and

TANDO: Why 'ave I got to be the one who 'as to sit by the vampire? The smell's 'orrible.
KANE: Don't worry. She'll get used to it.

and the script littered with repeated references to earlier TV episodes (Jevron, Blake's clone, Tando being a friend of Gan, Tando himself, Blake calling himself Dev Varon the same surname as his defence lawyer from the first episode, Jenna, trekkers and more) and fannish in-jokes (Boucher rifles, for instance, and 'shooting zombies off an elevator').

Finally, and most Russelly of all, the authors can't help themselves but (a) unnecessarily provide continuity fills (now we know how Blake got the scar across his eye seen in 'Blake') and (b) interject their own per theories into semi-official canon. This last is particularly annoying for two reasons. First, for all that Stevens and Fiona Moore's excellent guide to Blakes 7 makes an interesting case for the idea that Olag Gan was a multiple rapist and sex murderer, there is really no concrete on-screen evidence to back it up and plenty to suggest it's just a clever if incorrect reading (the death penalty clearly still exists and a multiple killer would surely be executed not provided with an expensive limiter and shipped to a penal colony). Secondly, and more pertinently, the description of Gan as serial killer is a long and dull info dump which takes up several minutes of an already short play.

Finally, the Mutoid from War Crimes provides a link between the two plays (Kane is the other) but as with the earlier part it's entirely unclear what her purpose is. Badly damaged and left behind by the late Travis, Kane finds her and feeds her, without knowing who her former Commander was. In the end she is killed by Tando and dies whispering the name of her dead husband, Maryatt. Which is sad and all but not actually all that interesting.

Both as seperate plays and as a combined whole, The Mark of Kane (a title as confused as the rest of the play), is a big disappointment, especially considering that Stevens and Tulley went on to collaborate with Jim Smith on the far better Logic of Empire and Stevens eventually launched the absolutely first-rate Kaldor City series.

Best I think to view this as a piece of historical juvenalia and makes excuses for it on that basis...

[The complete script to Mark of Kane is available here]