More of Adam Adamant

Damn you, Guy Adams!

I was left so traumatised by the end of the first volume of Big Finish episodes of Adam Adamant Lives! that I had to find out what happens next!

Will Georgina escape The Face?

Will Adam ever find happiness?

So I've just pre-ordered Volume 2 from Big Finish, which promises a bank robbery by highwaymen and a show down between Adam Adamant and The Face, among other things.

Guy Adams has also written these three episodes, and also plays Simms, Adam's manservant.

I fully expect to be traumatised by the excellent writing and acting again, but this time I'll have a stiff drink ready....

Shadow of the Past - Big Finish

Dr Liz Shaw has always been one of the lesser known Companions of the Doctor, spending a season with the Third Doctor and then disappearing as Jo Grant is introduced.
I rather liked her - sensible, scientific, and taking no nonsense from the Doctor.
Sadly, Caroline Johns (who played Liz Shaw) didn't do much for Big Finish - but I've just finished listening to Shadow of the Past, and if it was all to this standard then what she did do was very good.
The story is part of the Companion Chronicles, and it's a two hander, with Caroline Johns as Liz Shaw and Lex Shrapnel as the young UNIT soldier who accompanies her.
She's been called in, as an older woman, to the opening of a UNIT vault that was sealed in the 1970s, which leads to her telling the story of the crashed space ship in the vault to the young soldier accompanying her.
The story is by Simon Guerrier, and nicely catches the tone of the Third Doctor's UNIT days, and he's placed it between Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Ambassadors of Death - so the Doctor's relationship with the Brigadier is quite strained at this point (after the Brig blew up the Silurian caves).
I shall be getting more Big Finish stories with Liz Shaw, I think.

Too Many Targets - Avengers from Big Finish

This is the British, 1960s, Avengers, of course, not the more famous Marvel Avengers. Big Finish don't only do audio adventures for Doctor Who - they've branched out into other cult TV shows as well.
It's a great temptation, because of the Doctor Who link to Big Finish, to think of this story as Steed with all of his Companions. The story is set at the time when Steed is paired with Tara King, played by Emily Woodward, but gradually brings in all the other people he's worked with up to that time.
It took me a while to get used to Julian Wadham as Steed - after all, Patrick Macnee had such a distinctive voice, but as they said in the actor interviews which are also on the CD, the characterisation is all there in the script. They'd got the way Steed talked exactly right. It's also quite nice that Christopher Benjamin, who plays Mother, also appeared in several episodes of the original series.
Cathy Gale gets involved because of a rogue killer gorilla in Surrey, and Beth Chalmers does have a voice very like Honor Blackman's. All the actresses involved said it was great fun doing the period RP accents!
Mrs Peel (Olivia Poulet) is now running Knight Industries, which also seems to be involved in the case, and Dr David Keel (Anthony Howell) gets involved when a colleague of his gets kidnapped.
There's a glorious scene with the constantly frustrated KGB agent who is Steed's Russian counterpart(voiced by Dan Starkey, sounding very much like Warren Mitchell, who originally played the part).
The script is based on a novel that came out in 1990, written as a homage to the series by John Peel and Dave Rogers, and it really captures the witty banter and bizarre situations of the original series.
I loved it!

Doctor Who and the Peterloo Massacre

Just out from Big Finish is a 5th Doctor story by Paul Magrs, set in Manchester in 1819, the time of the Peterloo Massacre.
This is part of my local history - I'm from Manchester, and I remember being taken to see the plaque commemorating the 15 dead of the massacre (and the 600+ injured), at St Peter's Field when I was a child.
Historical stories are so often set around London, but other cities have interesting histories too, and this was an important event in working class history and Manchester's history. The peaceful crowd of around 80,000 had gathered to hear speeches against the Corn Laws - they wanted cheaper bread, and they also wanted to be able to vote. Manchester was growing rapidly with industrialisation, any yet had no MP. There were only two MPs for the whole of Lancashire, and only (male) property owners could vote.
After the reading of the Riot Act (which nobody heard) the local Yeomanry charged into the crowd on horseback, sabres drawn - and later cannons were used against the unarmed crowd. The regular Hussars, also in attendance, were horrified by the actions of the Yeomanry, and some officers tried to restrain the Yeomanry, while the way to Peter Street was blocked by infantry with bayonets, so the crowd could not escape - an early version of "kettling".
This was also one of the first mass meetings that journalists attended, and the Doctor has a great rant at Thomas Tyler, the journalist from London, urging him to tell the truth about what he has seen.
Peter Davison is in great form in this retelling of the story of the Massacre, and so are Tegan (snarling about the injustice of it all) and Nyssa (befriending a maidservant who is involved with the Radicals). Of course, they cannot stop the massacre from happening - it's a fixed point in time ("You always say that," grumbles Tegan) but they can do something to help, out of the historical spotlight.
The other actors, playing the historical characters, have properly Northern accents - there's a little extra at the end where they talk about the story and the director says he didn't want actors with RP accents pretending to be Northern.
"I was surprised there were no aliens in this one," Peter Davison says, at the end.
"Except you and Nyssa," Janet Fielding says.
"Oh, good point."

Doctor Who Unbound from Big Finish

Some time ago, I heard about a CD put out by Big Finish in which the Doctor has regenerated into female form, and is hiding out from the Time Lords by working at a supermarket and going down the pub.
I've finally got round to ordering it from Big Finish. It's called Exile, by Nicholas Briggs, in the Doctor Who Unbound series, and stars Arabella Weir as the Doctor. A bonus is the fact that David Tennant plays Time Lord 2 (and I wouldn't have known - he sounds very different from his usual voice).
Well, I'm glad I listened to it, but there was rather too much drinking to excess and throwing up afterwards for my taste. It was very much played for laughs (as with the Time Lords arriving in the year 2000 dressed like something out of Starsky and Hutch).

While I was looking at the Doctor Who Unbound series, I noticed Sympathy for the Devil, by Jonathan Clements, and decided to order that as well.
This was very impressive! The Doctor this time is David Warner, who plays it much in the style of Patrick Troughton. He has been exiled to Earth by the Time Lords - but instead of arriving in the 1970s and joining UNIT, he arrives in 1997. So this is an alternate time line where UNIT had to deal with all sorts of alien threats without the Doctor's help.
The Doctor arrives in Hong Kong, on the eve of the handover to Chinese control, and finds the retired Brigadier running a pub on the waterfront. And then an invisible plane crashes on the hillside.
Again, there's the bonus of David Tennant, playing Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood - this time with a broad Scottish accent, and an antagonistic attitude towards the Brig.
It's got Buddhist monks, and an old enemy, and I enjoyed it immensely!

Big Finish: The Audio Scripts

I've only recently been getting into the world of Big Finish, the audio adventures of Doctor Who, together with spin-offs Jago and Litefoot (from the story The Talons of Weng Chiang), Companion Chronicles, and other audio adventures like Blake's Seven. Partly, I've been floundering because I didn't know where to start, though the Eighth Doctor seemed like a good bet, since the film and the audio adventures are all we have of him. So one of the first CDs I bought was Chimes of Midnight, where he's paired with Charley Pollard, who was supposed to have died in the R101 disaster in 1930.
Chimes of Midnight just happens to be one of the scripts published in the three volumes I found by chance in one of the other bookshops in Hay-on-Wye, and each script comes with a couple of essays about the story, and changes that were made to the scripts during production.

This was fascinating stuff! Each volume contains a script from each of the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors, and I found that I could hear the voices of the characters as I read the scripts really quite easily, which is a mark of the quality of the writing.

We start with Loups-Garoux by Marc Platt, a werewolf story with the Fifth Doctor and Turlough, but it was the second story, The Holy Terror by Robert Shearman, starring the Sixth Doctor and Frobisher the talking penguin (of all people!) that really chilled my blood.
Then the Seventh Doctor and Mel (who actually comes over as being quite sensible and not screamy at all) go to Pompeii in The Fires of Vulcan by Steve Lyons, and the Eighth Doctor and Charley get involved in Gallifreyan problems with Anti-Time in Neverland, with President Romana - and oh, joy! Rassilon is played by Don Warrington, who has just the right sonorous tones for the First of the Time Lords. This one ends on such a cliffhanger that I will have to get the CD of Zagreus, which follows this story, to find out what happens next. It appears I may be in for a treat, as this is the 40th Anniversary multi-Doctor story, though some reviews say that it is very confusing. We shall see....

Volume Two starts with The Eye of the Scorpion by Iain McLaughlin, starring the Fifth Doctor and Peri in Ancient Egypt, followed by The One Doctor by Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman, which stars the Sixth Doctor and Mel - and Christopher Biggins as a con artist who is pretending to be the Doctor.
Dust Breeding by Mike Tucker has the Seventh Doctor and Ace, the painting The Scream by Edvard Munch, and the Master, and Seasons of Fear by Paul Cornell and Caroline Symcox has the Eighth Doctor and Charley hopping about through time from a Roman camp to the Court of Edward the Confessor to the headquarters of the Hellfire Club, via Singapore in 1930.

Volume Three starts with one of the best (and scariest) Fifth Doctor stories I think I've ever come across in any format - Spare Parts by Marc Platt. It's the origin story for the Cybermen, and also stars Sally Knyvette (Jenna from Blake's Seven) as the doctor developing the Cybermen. Nyssa is the companion in this one.
The Spectre of Lanyon Moor by Nicholas Pegg is a Tom Baker style romp complete with mysterious archaeological dig and UNIT (the Brig is retired, but still manages to save the Earth!) but with Colin Baker and his audio companion Dr Evelyn Smythe taking the part that was first intended for Sarah Jane, had Tom Baker agreed to take part. The Rapture, by Joseph Lidster is a Seventh Doctor and Ace story, set around a club in Ibiza, and the final story in the volume is The Chimes of Midnight by Robert Shearman.

I enjoyed all of them, and now I'll have a better idea of where to jump in to try more when I visit the Big Finish website again....

Thin Ice

Recently, I've started collecting audio dramas from Big Finish, the company that produces Doctor Who dramas involving many members of the classic cast. I've been enjoying the adventures of the Eighth Doctor, Paul McGann, and his companions Charley Pollard and Lucie Miller - there have been some extremely good stories, including Chimes of Midnight and Sisters of the Flame (which not only features the Sisterhood of Karn, but also has the voices of Alexander Siddig and Nikolas Grace in the cast!)
Branching out a bit from the Doctor who sadly never was on TV, my Young Man gave me Thin Ice, by Marc Platt, a Seventh Doctor and Ace story which was originally intended for the Seventh Doctor after the series was cancelled. Now the story is on audio, they can set it in Moscow with a huge parade in Red Square without worrying about the budget. The plot concerns Ice Warriors and dodgy East End gangsters in Cold War Moscow, a fish finger warehouse on the Thames, and an ancient Martian weapon, as well as some dubious dealings by the Time Lords - it's superbly good, and I'll be getting more of the Seventh Doctor's adventures soon.