30 Discs Hath November #23: The Barnacled Baby

Audio Adventures in Time and Space #30:

The Barnacled Baby

written by Anthony Keetch

Its back to the world of unlicensed Doctor Who spin-offs for another adventure featuring a well-known one-off monster from the show. This time its the shapeshifting fetus people the Zygons and... well...

Okay, to put it mildly there are times when BBV landed on the wrong wide of good taste. There was Only Human that took a hard swerve into trigger warning territory in the middle of what felt like a lightweight Doctor Who adventure and some seriously insensitive material about child loss in The Rani Reaps The Whirlwind. By comparison inflicting the mental image of a Zygon beastfeeding is mild by comparison but still not entirely pleasant (due to it being a Zygon, not the act of breastfeeding itself, you understand). The idea is that the Zygon is weak because he doesn't have a Skarasen to drink the milk from and this woman has offered to sub in.

Anyway, the situation is this: the Zygon is alone and cut off from his spaceship and because he landed in Victorian England he's ended up in a freakshow. The owner sees “the Barnacled Baby of the Sea” as his meal ticket, a wonder that Queen Victoria wants to view and PT Barnum wants to exhibit. There's also a wealthy doctor, Sir Frederick Maltravers (played by Clive Merrison, to my great surprise) who wants to purchase the Zygon in the name of science.

Talking of surprising voices, this is the first time I've heard Deborah Watling perform since her death. Its always a funny feeling, that voice from the past you know is no longer around. I sort of dread listening to the final Jago & Litefoot box set for this very reason. Watling appears only briefly but gets in a corker of the final scene where she gets to deliver the twist punchline I'm starting to get used to from these monster-led audios.

Bizarre breastfeeding scenes aside, this is actually a good take on one of the classic science-fiction situations. Bobby the Zygon (who has an alien name but one the internet refuses to tell me how to spell) is in a weak position and proceeds to manipulate or murder whoever he needs to in an attempt to locate his ship. Running alongside the Zygon's story is tale of typically squalid Victorian family drama with the freakshow owner Jethro and his much abused daughter Doris, her former lover Toby and the financial problems and opportunities of all three. Its actually a lot better written and performed than the last couple of these monster audio I listened to. Quality-wise its much more like The Quality of Mercy was: well-acted and atmospheric with a well-realised historical setting.

Sadly, TARDIS Wikia credits Anthony Keetch with only three other pieces of Doctor Who fiction, all of them prose Short Trips and he;s mainly an actor. In fact, he's Coordinator Vansell from the early Gallifrey-set Big Finish audios which I didn't realise under the thick jolly Cockney accent. Pity, I would rather have enjoyed hearing some more full-length audios from him. 

30 Discs Hath November #18: The Green Man

Audio Adventures in Time and Space #33:

The Green Man

written by Zoltán Déry

Its back to the world of semi-legal spin-offs for one of those later run BBV audios where they licensed the rights to monsters and wrote stories about them. In this case its the Krynoids, a vegetable creature that takes over humans and turns them into Krynoids.

In this case the Krynoid has landed in darkest Mummerset sometimes in medieval times. In theory I see the thinking. Medieval times and an alien that possesses people and takes them over. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work out like that. As with in the original story there are two Krynoid pods, the first one takes over a herbalist called Osbert but he's dispatched in pretty short order leaving us with Pod #2 which has possessed a wolf and therefore isn't much conversation. This being an audio drama, an enemy that isn't much conversation is a pretty bad thing to have.

Zoltán Déry tries, bless him, to deliver on impressive visuals but, again, this is an audio and so having people telling me that the Krynoid has got bigger again is just a little underwhelming.

There is some investment to be had with the human cast even if the local (and non-speaking) lady's fever is a pretty bad attempt at raising tension seeing as we never get to meet her and her illness is never really defined. The character of Moses, a Jewish doctor and scientist brought in by the earl to heal his lady, is interesting though his allusions to losing his family during the crusades (and at European hands) serves as little more than a reason for the earl to feel uncomfortable and stop calling him “Jew” to his face.

All in all, I'd say this was a better story in concept than execution. There are some neat ideas like Moses trying to reverse engineer Greek fire using limited resources and a templar knight scientifically proving the Krynoid isn't a demon by dipping his sword in holy water and discovering it does nothing to make the sword more effective.

Oh well, they can't all be winners. 

30 Discs Hath November #13: The Quality of Mercy

Audio Adventures in Time and Space #35

The Quality of Mercy

written by David A. McIntee

Okay, so another one of these. In this case the minor non-BBC owned aspect BBV are working with is Guy de Carnac, a Templar Knight and one-off love interest of Bernice Summerfield from the novel Sanctuary which even when this was made was five years or more out of print. I haven;t read Sanctuary in years and I'm pretty sure Guy dies at the end but, well, retcons are a thing and here we are: the further adventures if Guy de Carnac that I can't imagine anyone was clamouring for but here we are.

If I seemed down on this series yesterday its because I had fond memories of these releases that I Scream didn't live up to. Happily, The Quality of Mercy was a better production all round. It had none of the off-putting straight to listener narration or lack of ambient sound that made I Scream such a slog. In fact, it made a good impression straight off with a Gregorian chant intro, church bells and neighing horses to set the scene.

Its Crusades o'clock and Guy de Carnac is a former Templar knight wandering darkest Mummerset in search of a farrier. He comes to a town which is awaiting an inquisitor to question a strange man who fell from the sky and speaks no known language. As a well-traveled man and servant of God, Guy is asked to look in on the stranger who he judges to be neither angel nor demon but simply a man, a sailor from some strange and unknown land.

The inquisitor, when he arrives, is naturally a lot more cynical. He's no as bloodthirsty as the stereotype would have it because this is David A. McIntee writing and he does a lot of historical research. The inquisitor is still the villain of the piece and he has less than pure motivations but he doesn't start torturing people out of boredom or anything like that.

Thankfully, the debate over who or what the sailor from the sky is doesn't form the whole mystery of the story. I say thankfully because anyone paying even minimal attention can tell instantly that he's an alien and no amount of listening to Guy and the inquisitor trying to puzzle that out with their literally medieval frame of reference is going to make that carry an entire hour. Its made clear early on that Guy is no longer a Templar and the reasons for his expulsion are made a central mystery of the story even as he tries to discover the truth behind the sailor. Guy has a good line in theological debate even if it is mainly to convince people that the way he wants to do things is the way God intended. I'm also interested that Guy's complex attitude towards Christianity (though not towards God, it seems) is presented as quite morally neutral, neither a reason to condemn him or a reason to lionise him which is an unusual attitude for an author to take.

As it happens this was the sole Guy de Carnac story BBV produced before the Audio Adventures ended but it does make me want to revisit Sanctuary now I have a voice to apply to the character. 

30 Discs Hath November #12: I Scream

Audio Adventures in Time and Space #26

I Scream

written by Lance Parkin

So, back in the day before Big Finish there was BBV, a fan-run company that made independent audio dramas using whatever bits and pieces of Doctor Who they could license from non-BBC sources (monsters owned by writers, for instance) or casting familiar actors in strangely familiar but not quite copyrighted roles (such as having Sylvester McCoy playing a time traveler called “The Professor”).

Some of these releases got a little obscure.

Take this one, for instance: the I are an alien race from a single Eighth Doctor novel, Seeing I by Kate Orman and Jon Blum. I remember literally nothing about them except that they were the running the world from behind the scenes types. In the case of this story the world is Glaspar, a planet given over almost completely to ice cream production, the best ice cream in the galaxy.

Out POV character and narrator is played by Lisa Bowerman, the manager of the largest ice cream restaurant on the planet. On Galspar the company runs everything (a running theme of Doctor Who books at the time) and everyone, ultimately, works for the company. They run the media as well with a sort of Orwellian brainwashy thing called the I Screen interrupting the narration from time to time to tell you how great the company is.

Bowerman's character (who is either never named or I wasn't listening) meets a group of dropouts let by the pretty and charismatic John. She goes on an astral projecting joyride with him and his telepath friend and encounter the I.

There's a lot of pop psychology stuff about teenage rebellion and counter-culture as an aspect of culture. Its a bit dull, to be honest. The dull ice cream-themed dystopia turns out to be run by bodysnatcher-style emotionless managers, the main evidence for this conclusion being that the one we encounter speaks a bit stiltedly and doesn't get off on having picture of Bowerman's character naked. There's a nice twist where Bowerman's character thinks the dropouts are part of the system, secret police.

She's wrong, sadly, but it was a nice twist while it lasted.

After that Bowerman's character descends into complete paranoia about being watched by the I. The narration is, to be honest, a little overwrought. She finds herself in hospital after an apparent suicide attempt. Naturally, she doesn't help herself by just plainly describing her belief the world is being controlled by insect people to the doctors in the hospital. Paranoia is a hard thing to convey only in sound and I'm not sure everything Parkin does works but there are some cool moments as Bowerman's narration becomes more and more frantic.

Ultimately its a bit like one of those short 2000AD comic strips: a big high concept with an ending that has a nice punch but isn't meant to go further than it does.