Bernice
Summerfield 7.3:
The Worst
Thing In The World
written by
Dave Stone
Dave Stone
is a funny one. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with his
writing but not in the sense of some worked landing on one side and
some on the other. That would be too simple an attitude to have
towards The New Adventures'
weirdest son, oh no. No, I tend to find his stuff a bit hard to get
into but once I'm a few minutes/chapters in I start going with the
flow and really enjoying it. Thus it was when I originally bought
this CD: I got a couple of minutes into the Eastenders
parody that opens the disc and gave up.
Then,
when it was getting on for two o'clock this afternoon and I still
hadn't written anything for this 30 Discs series and nothing was
really grabbing me so I thought “Sod it, might as well get this one
out of the way.”.
Whatever
else I have to say about the story it made me realise how much I miss
Jason Kane and hope that we get to see him again some day, an idea
that was briefly mentioned at the end of the old Bernice box set
series before they went back to being an explicit Doctor Who
spin-off. I love that old chancer and his on-off relationship with
Bernice that actually manages to be as entertaining whether its off
or on. In this story he's being interviewed for galactic television
as the director of a “xeno-porn bondage” movie because that's
just the sort of thing Jason gets involved with when Benny isn't
keeping him in line.
Anyway,
he's being interviewed on “the Drome”: a massive self-contained
corporate eco-system entirely dedicated to producing television shows.
Everyone is part of the show there with actors doubling as audience
members in other shows. Its all the brainchild of Marvin Glass whose
brain patterns power the massive “transputer” that runs the Drome
and who is inconveniently murdered a few minutes into the story
providing us with plot and Jason with a reason to call in the
expertise of his ex-wife.
It
also gives Bernice a chance to escape the chaos of the post-Braxiatel
Collection. I don't really remember the all the context (this has
been sitting to one side for quite literally a couple of years) but
it turns out that Bev Tarrant is not enjoying running the place after
they kicked the boss out and Benny is extremely keen to have an
adventure that's just fun and has nothing to do with anything.
The
story that follows is one of the more batshit installments in
Bernice's series as she and Jason find themselves dawn into various
TV parodies as characters between more straightforward scenes of them
going undercover to investigate Marvin Glass' murder. Your mileage
will probably vary on this story depending on how much you enjoy
really comical parodies such as, say, Bernice waking up as the
heroine in a bodice ripper period drama and really, really
living up to the name of the genre. Its the sort of over the top
weird that one expects from Dave Stone which is either a massive
selling point or a big strike against the story, in my case kind of
both since it first stopped me getting into the plot and then was
what kept me listening.
The
end of the story promises that Benny and Jason are on their way back
to the Collection to deal with ongoing plot which I am rather looking
forward to because I do miss the Collection cast and I think I'll
spend these next few entries polishing off season seven as listening
to Ruler of the Universe
reminded me how fun the Bernice Summerfield series is.
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