The second of the Gareth Roberts novelisations is one that I
haven’t read before. The story sees the Doctor and Romana arrive in 1930’s
London where for some reason the Doctor decides that he wants to return some
library books. Of course this being a Doctor Who story things don’t go smoothly
and its usually a question of how long it would take the Doctor to get into
trouble.
Setting this story in the 1930’s means that we are going to
get a plethora of posh speaking characters which is quite amusing but after a
few minutes, things need to develop and thankfully things do. The threat of
this story is a gaseous villain called Zodaal. Despite being a visual idea, its
one that works very well and Big Finish have a good track record of making
normally visual villains work on audio. Zodaal wants to possess humans just so
that they can eat brains. The lengths some people will go to to get a new body.
Despite a good start, I have to admit that the story did start to drift away a
bit. I don’t know what it was but I thought that The Romance of Crime was the stronger story.
There were some good moments in this story. One of the more
memorable ones included K9 being possessed. I know that in the past I have been
quite hard on K9 but I cant say that this wasn’t a good use of the character.
Like the previous story, I thought that Tom Baker and Lalla
Ward were superb and actually this was a better story for Romana than Romance.
There were times that Lalla Ward was talking and I thought that I was listening
to a Gallifrey story because she gave that sort of intensity to the
performance. Like in the previous story, there was a performance which I
thought stood out and that was Terence Hardiman’s performance as Stackhouse.
Now I remember him and will always remember him as the titular character in the
Demon Headmaster. It’s a performance that is as good as Miranda Raison’s Margo
and Xais.
Jamie Robertson deserves some credit for creating a very
atmospheric atmosphere and a world that sounds real and somewhere that I would
want to spend some time in. Just without the zombie inducing gas. Robertson won
a Tomstardis Awards for his work on The
Silver Turk which is another historical story so it shouldn’t come as much
of a surprise that he was done well creating such a convincing world. I don’t
give the covers much time during my reviews but I think that Tom Webster has
created another striking cover and its better than the one for Romance which is
a cover that I really liked.
John Dorney has done a very good job of adapting these two
stories and unlike previous novelisations such as Love and War, I didn’t find myself wishing the end would come and even
though I thought the second half of this story wasn’t as strong as the first.
It wasn’t terrible by any means. Nicholas Briggs has directed this story with
the same usual amount of energy and its when the writing and directing come
together that we have something that is enjoyable to listen to.
Whilst it wasn’t the better of the two stories, I thought
that this was a good release and at least complimented the previous story well
and I thought that it was well worth the £25 that I paid for the downloaded
version. There is another Gareth Roberts novelisation coming this year so I
hope that it manages to keep up to the standard these two have done. 
No comments:
Post a Comment