The Child (2012)

The Child is the final Companion Chronicle of 2012 and it’s a Leela story and its fair to say that we have had a lot of Louise Jameson in 2012 what with the Fourth Doctor adventures and Jago and Litefoot. Now I had some mixed feeling when I was about to listen to this because Leela in the Fourth Doctor adventures and Jago and Litefoot has been a joy to listen to but the Leela in the companion chronicles has been anything but. The last one which was The Time Vampire almost two and a half years ago wasn’t a particularly good story. This story (according to the interview at the end) is the first of three stories which makes sense when you listen.

When the story starts we get a woman talking in a child like voice having a ‘conversation’ with Leela. Leela is telling her a story which starts off quite serious but by the second episode it seems to have taken on a slightly comedic tone which wasn’t a problem just unexpected. I think that despite how strong the first part was I thought that the second was better. There is a mystery as to what is going on with Leela and Emily. Leela’s voice is not her usual voice as it has a ghostly quality to it but it still feels like the old Leela. The story starts off with the Doctor and Leela arriving in a place where there are loads of rooms exactly the same without anyone or anything in it. Nigel Fairs has done a great job in describing this world that the Doctor and Leela find themselves and the wonderful descriptions that are used help create a wonderful world and find a good balance between that story and the Emily story. The idea that Leela has to go on a journey with an old woman, a crow/raven like figure is something that has a nice comedic feel to it which works well in a Fourth Doctor adventure.

There’s not much I can really say about Louise Jameson because I will have written it several times this year and she is just as good as she always is. What I will say is throughout 2012 Louise Jameson has shown us different sides to Leela’s character and she manages to show another side in this story. She’s not the savage she was in Face of Evil but has developed during her time with the Doctor. Anna Hawkes is rather good as she does a convincing child voice and it was clear that the voice was suppose to be irritating because of the way that the character believes that the man of the family is the leader and all but admits that her mother is a servant to her father. They have some great scenes together.

It will be interesting to see where the two remaining stories  will go but on the basis of this story I am looking forward to the future stories. This was a massive improvement on The Time Vampire and I thought that The Child was the perfect way to end the year in the Companion Chronicles and Louise Jameson to end her best year for Big Finish. Nigel Fairs has written a magical story that suits this time of year and it was the best Leela Companion Chronicle that we have had and the future stories have a lot to live up to.

Jago in Love (2012)

Jago and Litefoot return for a fourth series much to the delight of people like myself who think that this spin-off has been one of the most enjoyable that Big Finish have ever done. It’s possibly when the series might struggle because very few series have got this far. Gallifrey and Dalek Empire are quite different from how they began and it was going to be interesting to see how this series would be compared to the first three. Louise Jameson is still in Jago and Litefoot which wasn’t the plan originally and Jago in Love is the sixth story to feature Leela this year but that isn’t a complaint more a statement. The story does a nice thing of replaying a few moments of the previous story because it had been a while since I listened to Chronoclasm and it was good that this was included so that I had a vague idea of where the story was coming from. Sadly my first complaint is that there isn’t enough Colin Baker. I know we will get more in future stories but I’m an impatient soul and would like more please. Well the story sees Jago and Litefoot deal with vampires of a sort but it’s the setting which helped make this more than just a normal vampire story (as if there is such a thing in the Dr Who world!). Moving the story to Brighton helped create a different feel to the story. Much in the way an episode of Eastenders or something that is based in one town changes when they go somewhere different this is what happens in this story.

I also liked how the first half of the story seemed to be told in a flashback. We learn how the three characters go from London to Brighton and we also discover that Jago is as the title suggests in love. Also as the title suggests, the story is led by Christopher Benjamin and he is given the lion shares of the story and also of the dialogue. This means that Trevor Baxter is rather like a spare part and only really comes into the story when he becomes possessed. There was a moment when they talk about his face and the reaction from the people around show that this would have looked great on TV. That’s the thing about Jago in Love is that I think it doesn’t try and big itself up and by that I mean whereas I have always found the opening story of the previous three series to be arguably the best and most enjoyable I don’t think that same about this one. That isn’t to say I don’t like this but I think that they have been clever in not putting all their eggs in one basket, they are simply telling a good story and introducing a few nuggets of a story arc. The story spends a while building up the drama and it’s a while before it really goes bonkers and that’s when the story really shows what it’s made of. I did suspect that there was something odd about Abigail Woburn because… well there wouldn’t be any point in ruining a perfectly good partnership otherwise.

The performances in this are all very good. Christopher Benjamin manages to make his performance seem effortless and it was actually quite nice to see Litefoot genuinely happy for once and Benjamin showed that in this story. Baxter as I have mentioned had less to do but still managed to make it seem like his contribution was just as big as always. Louise Jameson was also side-lined and I think that 2012 is her year and whilst this isn’t possibly as strong as her other stories with the Fourth Doctor, I still think that the Leela we get in for Big Finish is superior to what we had on TV. I also thought that Elizabeth Counsell was very good as the love interest. I believed in her character and found that she was the perfect person to try and ‘ruin’ the relationship between Jago and Litefoot, the sort of person that Henry Gordon Jago would go for. Nigel Fairs is a writer that sometimes I think is ok and sometimes isn’t. I found Time Vampire to be very poor but I have to say that this is his best offering so far. I think that it’s a completely different opening story to what we have had in the past and Fairs’ script has managed to be entertaining and different from what we have had in the past. I wondered at the beginning whether the fourth series would be where the it loses steam and starts to go off the rails but I’m glad to say that the dynamic duo of the Victorian age are as on form as ever. I look forward to the remaining story with the same level of excitement that I had before Jago in Love.

The Time Vampire (2010)

The Time Vampires is the third story in the trilogy of Leela adventures. Starting with The Catalyst I recently re-listened to that story and found it to be enjoyable. Likewise with Empathy Games this is a story that requires a second listen. But the thing about both of those plays are that I really didn’t get them on the first listen. In fact even on the second listen I struggled to fully get them. Sadly it’s the same problem I have with the Time Vampire. Nigel Fairs is given the opportunity to conclude this trilogy which is probably the best thing to do.

The starts off with the Doctor repairing K9 and Leela encountering an old K9 in the wooden console room that was destroyed in Empathy Games. There the mystery starts. Things disappear and reappear and things bob along at a nice fair pace but when the story needs to deliver for the listener it doesn’t. The second half of the story is just pretty much the same of what was going in the first half. The last five or so minutes are spent up with the death of Leela but if the rest of the story had been as enjoyable and more importantly been as simple then I would have liked this story more.

The main problem with this story is that it’s too complicated. I personally don’t think that you have to listen to something more than once to understand it. I never really understood what a) The Time Vampire was and b)what was going on in the main plot. There is an awful lot of shifting between time zones kind of like Lost but making less sense. There’s a lot of things going on and Louise Jameson does a great job in trying to explain it and I think that plays the character of Leela just as good as she did over 30 years ago. Even John Leeson as K9 was good despite the fact of my dislike for the tin dog. The main problem with K9 on TV is that he was too smart and you could hear him coming a mile off and he could shoot people but after three goes his battery had run out. In audio we could marvel John Leeson and its nice that 33 years after he started as K9 he sill enjoys doing it. There was a line in the Extras in the end that David Richardson says “You have to work for it”. I completely disagree, you should fully understand and also enjoy it. The only time that you should have to listen to something more than once is if you want to listen to it again because you liked it so much, not because you didn’t understand something.

Despite not understanding it I still found certain parts of it to be very good. However out of the three stories to feature Leela this isn’t the best. That honour goes to The Catalyst.

The Catalyst (2008)

When I first reviewed this story back in January 2008, I was rather unkind to it. This is how I described it then.

“The main problem with this story is that I had a bit of difficulty in understanding what the actual point of the story was. I was still wandering that at the end of the story which is never good. I thought that the story was going well for the first 15 or 20 minutes and then my interest seemed to disappear.

Overall this story was ok but nothing special”

With the pending release of The Time Vampire which makes it a Trilogy of adventures for Leela I decided to re-review this story. The story starts off with Leela who is also known as Prisoner 270-G. She is in the last moments of her life and she tells of a story. The reason why the Doctor and Leela are in their present adventure is that the Doctor is trying to teach Leela how to be more ladylike which is something that the Fourth Doctor seemed to spend most of his time with Leela doing. The Doctor and Leela are at the home of Lord Joshua Douglas and what looks like a bland dinner soon turns into darkness.

The house is hiding a secret. The Doctor has imprisoned an alien called H’mbrackle who is an officer of the Z’nai who are a noble race of warriors but he was the last of his race. By the end of the first episode two characters had been killed off and the thing that surprised me was how much of an effect it had because especially Jessica who was quite an annoying character but that made her death even more sad. H’mbrackle wanted the Doctor to help him restore the power of the Z’nai but the Doctor knew that he would have to sacrifice his being to do this and this is what led him to imprison H’mbrackle.

Louise Jameson is better when she’s telling the story than when she’s being Leela. I’m not a massive Leela fan but when as I was listening to this again I could understand why people liked her. I also thought that Timothy Watson was very good H’brackle and his voice was well suited to the tone of the character. Nigel Fairs has written a very good story that has just the right amount of drama and some very strong characters. He is also responsible for the music and sound design and that shows as everything is on sync to provide possibly the best story of the second series.

One of the problems I had when I originally reviewed the story was that it was difficult to follow. Well I cant really recall why I said this. From what I heard this story was quite straight forward. I must have been having an off day. I’m going to amend my the final line from my original review.

Overall this story is very good and is something special.

The Blue Tooth (2007)

The Blue Tooth sees Liz Shaw tell us of an adventure with the Third Doctor that we don’t yet know. This is a story that I was looking forward to because it was Liz Shaw and I thought that her time in the show was far too short. She only ‘travelled’ with the Doctor for one series in 1970. Also she never met either the Daleks or Cybermen so in this story she gets to cross one of them off her list. There is also the matter of the fact that the Doctor never met the Cybermen on TV. This story isn’t the first to have Caroline John in it. She previously appeared in the 2001 adventure Dust Breeding as Madame Salvadori. In that she wasn’t recognisable as Liz Shaw but knowing that she was in the story all I could think of when I heard her speak was that it was the Doctors companion acting not Madam Salvadori.

The story doesn’t insult the listener by pretending that this is Liz Shaw circa 1970 but sometime afterwards. She sounds older and we get to hear of a different side of her than we knew on TV. The story is quite focused on Liz’s friend Jean who has disappeared and this leads for The Doctor and the Brigadier. Its interesting when Liz Shaw states that she didn’t like Jean to begin with when they met at Cambridge in the 1960’s as she found her irritating.

There are some lovely moments in this story such as The Brigadier and the Doctor clashing over the electricity bill that the Brigadier has had which is very high due to the Doctor’s experiments with the TARDIS. The Doctor storms off as he is getting frustrated with the Brigadier’s military mind not understanding what the Doctor is trying to do.

It could be argued that this story is her final adventure before she leaves UNIT and the 1971 series begins with Jo Grant replacing Liz Shaw as the companion. This is given some proof with Liz Shaw stating at the beginning when she first decided to leave UNIT. It was always a matter of time before she left as she was dragged in by the Brigadier in Spearhead From Space.

Caroline John puts in a good performance as Liz Shaw. Even though she is older she still retains some of the elements of Liz Shaw that we have all seen on DVD and VHS. We only got 4 stories of her and so its nice that she gets one more as I thought that the character of Liz Shaw was a strong one because she didn’t scream and was actually on the Doctor’s level in terms of intellegance. Nicholas Briggs makes his second appearance in these stories as the voice of the Cybermen. Briggs again puts in a good performance and makes the Cybermen sound truly menacing.

Nigel Fairs has written a very good story. This is perhaps the strongest one so far and uses the Cybermen much better than Patrick Chapman used the Daleks in Fear of the Daleks. Mark J Thompson directs his best story so far in this series. He keeps the pace going at a nice steady pace and doesn’t rush the ending. He keeps the feeling eerie and uses the most common phobia of dentists and uses that to its full potential.

The Blue Tooth is the best one in the series and hopefully with one more release to listen to I might be saying the second best story of the series. However I feel that there is nothing that can upstage this story as with Caroline John putting in a superb performance and the Cybermen anything better seems unlikely.

Empathy Games (2008)

The last Companion Chronicles featuring Leela in The Catalyst was a bit of a mixed bag. It was nice to have a story with Leela but it was either the fact that Louise Jameson felt unfortable or the story wasnt very good. I couldnt quite figure it out but in this story that point is irelevant. Empathy Games was a vast improvement. The story itself was quite simple which in a spoken book like this is a plus point. David Warner was a very good piece of casting. I thought that the beginning was a wonderful scene because the imagery along with the sound effects and the narration of Louise Jameson that helped create the sense that the Doctor was truly frightened.

After a confusing Doll of Death it was back to normal for the Companion Chronicles.

Cuddlesome (2008)

This special release for Doctor Who Magazine sees The Fifth Doctor battling cuddly teddy bears. Now normally this would be a big cause for concern but as I was listening to it the concern quickly disappeared. The idea that there were teddy bears that could kill reminded me of the 1971 Jon Pertwee adventure ‘Terror of the Autons’.

The plot was quick and constant, the revelation of what the cuddlesome’s reason for all the evilness was different but plausible. It set the story up and concluded in a satisfactory way and by the end of it I felt that I enjoyed the story. Peter Davison was great as the Doctor and his Doctor was on top form. Roberta Taylor who is more famous for starring in the ITV drama The Bill and had appeared in the 2000 play The Holy Terror was the best guest star in this play as the temporary companion Angela Wisher. Timothy West who had appeared in the BBC7/Eighth Doctor play Phobos (2007) was not far behind as the creator of the Cuddlesomes. David Troughton, son of the Second Doctor Patrick, was also good as The Tinghus.

Enjoyable Stuff

The Catalyst (2008)

The fourth and final release of Companion Chronicles sees Louise Jameson reprise her role as Leela. A part she played from January 1st 1977 to March 11th 1978. This story is written and directed by Nigel Fairs who had also penned The Blue Tooth. It was really nice to hear Louise Jameson reprise the role of Leela and it was nice to hear that she hasn’t changed in 30 years and that helps the story along. The main problem with this story is that I had a bit of difficulty in understanding what the actual point of the story was. I was still wandering that at the end of the story which is never good. I thought that the story was going well for the first 15 or 20 minutes and then my interest seemed to disappear. Overall this story was ok but nothing special