The 14 Days of A (5)

Ace of Wands – Sisters Deadly

I first saw an episode or two of Ace of Wands many years back on a copy of a copy of a c….opy of an off air VHS recording.  It was occasionally in colour, the dialogue was mostly audible and the advert breaks were rather crudely hacked out.  Then in 2007 the DVD box set came out and I finally saw the rest of the existing episodes and I got to experience the full colour experience.  And sadly there’s a reason it didn’t last much past the three years it got.

For those that haven’t seen it or don’t know about it Ace of Wands is a children’s TV series from the early 70s centred around Tarot, a magician with genuine powers and his various helpers.  The first season is completely lost (as of writing it is anyway), there are audio recordings of season two (I’ve got them somewhere but they’re shockingly low quality) and season three exists in full.  “Sisters Deadly” is two thirds of the way through the season and Tarot is currently accompanied by Mikki and Chas.  There’s also Ozymandias (played by Fred the Owl) but he’s not in this one much.  Chas has been employed to take photos of an old lady’s 100^th birthday party but ends up with memory loss and robbing a post office.  Tarot goes to investigate and finds more old ladies involved in a  rather bizarre plan to kidnap military personnel. It’s all rather weird…

Tarot, played by Michael MacKenzie suffers majorly from a case of the seventies.  His hair and clothes are dated in the extreme which instantly distracts from the plot (not such a bad thing at times).  Chas (played by Roy Holder) also suffers from the bad hair decade but ends up in military uniform and doesn’t suffer too badly.  Mikki, the rather stunning Petra Markham, didn’t strike me as being too badly fashioned but everything just ends up looking rather dated.  DVD picture quality, unfortunately, makes the twist in episode three very obvious from the start of episode one (I could be generous and say that it wasn’t supposed to be a huge secret but I’m guessing that they didn’t intend us to guess straight away) but thankfully Sylvia Coleridge is so brilliantly dotty (isn’t she always?) that you can easily watch the scenes and get diverted from the blindingly obvious.  Nothing can really hide the cheapness of the production though and the film sequences involving the army really make it look as though this country is protected by an undermanned Dad’s Army. 

It’s very hard to watch this and not compare it to more modern productions.  It’s slow and lumbering in places, it tries to make old ladies seem creepy and threatening (the end of the second episode almost succeeds but doesn’t quite work and left me laughing sadly) and the back of the DVD case tries to make it sound surprising this was the last season.  There’s nothing actually wrong with it, a modern remake would probably work exceptionally well, but this is just a little too 70s to be good and not so 70s it’s fantastically awful.  Tarot looks unearthly and I wish I could see season one to find out more about him, but by this third season it’s very much about plot rather than characters.  The booklet with the DVD fills in quite a bit of the back story but it’s just not the same.  I think I might just have got unlucky with the choice of story (picked at random) as I remember some of the others being much better this.  Then again, it could just be the memory cheating again.  Hmmmm, back on the shelf or do I give it another go with a different story…?

The 14 Days of A (4)

And Then There Were None…

Another favourite of mine story wise, but a movie adaption I haven’t seen in a long time.  Not 100% convinced I’ll be watching it again any time soon either, I just can’t quite put my finger on why…

For those who don’t know the story, you might want to stop reading now. It’s definitely my favourite Agatha Christie novel and, quite possibly, one of my favourite novels of all time.  I’ve read it countless times, the ending still chills me and it’s been copied many times but very rarely have those attempts come anywhere near the greatness of the novel.  The version I’ve pulled off the shelf is the third movie version, colour with Oliver Reed and Richard Attenborough amongst others.  Rather than inviting ten people to a house on an island, the house is relocated to the desert.  Diplomacy means the nursery rhyme is about Ten Little Indians (still not got as far as soldier boys though) and yes, as always seems to be the case they’ve given it the “revised” ending.  Gits.  Sorry but it’s one of the classic murder mysteries and yes, I know the ending that the book has would be very hard to film, but the BBC radio adaption managed to stick to the spirit of the original, why do the movie versions have to have such a crappy upbeat ending???

I really can’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong with this particular movie version.  It can’t just be the ending as the other films did the same (as did the stage play from memory) so it must be something else.  It can’t be the acting as the cast list is fairly impressive and they’re clearly all trying their hardest (maybe trying too hard?) and the scenery is definitely spectacular (strangely enough I quite like the idea of the new location as it makes it far more believably remote) so I’m narrowing it down to two things.  The music and the direction.  Neither are particularly awful but there’s something about the film that makes it seem flat.  By the time the first three or four characters have been bumped off there should be a real feeling of unease and fear amongst the characters but they just seem to carry on with little change to the way they’re acting.  The music should, by the end, be heart stopping suspense but it’s just a little too seventies to be able to pull it off.  Oh, and when people are singing at the piano, it didn’t help there was a drum beat out of nowhere to accompany them and make the song sound right.  Orson Welles guest voices as the person reading out the list of murder accusations but even that sequence is too bombastic for it to be terrifying.  There should have been a chill as they were read out but, instead, it’s almost like a headmaster reading out the prize list at the end of the school year.

Ah well.  No matter how flat the film it will always be a remarkable piece of plotting and story.  I’ve yet to see something pull off the “everyone dies” story without clearly ripping this one off or failing to reach its levels of style and charm.  It would just be nicer if they’d actually had the balls to make a movie version that had the very unpleasant and frightening ending that the book has.  Maybe one day…

The 14 Days of A (3)

Alice in Wonderland – “The Original Live-Action Classic”

Okay, I’m a HUGE Alice in Wonderland fan.  Forget being a friend of Dorothy, I’m an acquaintance of Alice.  I loved the story as a kid and it was the first school play I did voluntarily (and really enjoyed doing) so I regularly go back and either re-read or re-watch one of the films.  A few months back, in one of my comfort spending moments, I found the DVD of the version with Cary Grant and Gary Cooper in (amongst many others of course).  Sadly it was also one of those purchases which was made as a comfort spend and then got put on the shelf with the thought “I’ll watch that in a while”.  Well by my standards, several months later is very much within the “while” window (there are DVD’s I’ve had for years and not watched yet).  It also wasn’t a version I’d seen before so, rather than going for the well watched Disney version, it’s back to black and white and 1933.

And already I’m confused and angry… you see I’m very much an Alice separatist.  There’s Wonderland and there’s Looking Glass and I’m never a fan of the mix-and-match approach.  Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t tell you but I just like my Wonderland characters to be in Wonderland and everyone else in the Looking Glass land.  So this film (definitely titled Alice in Wonderland) didn’t do itself many favours by starting with the Looking Glass opening.  Technology being what it was in 1933 (ie largely absent), they’ve done their best to have Alice in the same shot as the white King and Queen and watching this on DVD probably didn’t do it too many favours.  I’m guessing even on a 1930s’ cinema screen the picture quality would have maybe been slightly less than pin sharp and so, to adjust, I watched the rest of the film with my glasses off and it did it huge amounts of favours (I did put them on from time to time to see how certain things looked though). So, slightly pacified over less than special effects and keen to see the Looking Glass story instead of the advertised product… I was rather shocked that fairly soon after passing through the mirror, Alice fell down a rabbit hole into Wonderland!  Really not what I was expecting at all! 

Wonderland, 1930s style, mostly consisted of people in slightly tatty looking animal costumes (glasses taken off fairly hastily when I realised) and people in rather strangely styled masks.  It’s almost like Alice’s Adventures in Bo’Selecta Land at times.  Anyway, the next 2/3 of the film were a fairly faithful telling of the standard Alice story.  Fairly soon I was happily immersed in the land of Hatters, Rabbits, Playing Cards and Queens.  A few times it was fairly obvious they were using slightly speeded up footage to try and create certain effects but all in all they did their best to make Wonderland a believable place.  Until all of a sudden we were back in Looking Glass land and visiting Humpty Dumpty, Tweedles Dum and Dee and more chess pieces.  Quite disconcerting as I’ve not really seen an Alice with such a sudden and blunt transition from one to the other (normally the characters are mixed together).  However, it did mean that I got to see a rather charming White Knight, an animated Walrus and Carpenter and a VERY strange and almost cannibalistic dinner sequence where Alice becomes a Queen in her own right.

The Caterpillar was possibly the only disappointing portrayal in this one (but, as no-one could ever be as good as the definitive early 90s stage performance that a certain person gave in the school production that’s hardly surprising) but the charm of this film carried me through to the end with a Cheshire cat like grin on my face.  Primitive, definitely.  Dubious flying and other special effects, undoubtedly.  A certain sense of child like glee at discovering which characters would pop up next… without doubt and that’s all that really mattered in the end.  Okay, I might not re-watch this one as much as I re-watch the Disney one (that one has songs, therefore it wins) but I can see this one coming of the shelf from time to time if only to see if the talking Christmas pudding freaks me out as much as it did first time around.

The 14 Days of A (2)

The Avengers Movie

Okay, I didn’t post this last night as the wind was playing havoc with my electricity and thus didn’t even settle down to watch the film till stupidly late.  Of course, anything with “stupidly” in the description is probably well suited to The Avengers movie, especially if it’s at the start of the sentence “deciding to put it on in the first place”.  I hadn’t seen it in quite a while, it begins with “A” and well… I had weird memories of actually not finding it too bad at all. As a science fiction fan I really should also have remembered that the memory isn’t always as reliable as you like to think and for 85 minutes last night I found myself playing chicken with the stop button on the remote control.  Would the film force me to hit the button before the end or would I somehow persuade the film to improve as it went along by actually watching it and not turning it off?  I would love to be able to say that, by staying to the end, I’d had some sort of victory but I feel that it was the film that had the last laugh.

It’s one of Hollywood’s more infamous cockups. Take what, by all accounts, could have been quite a good movie, show it to the test audiences and then, when they say it’s too long, hack out the plot and leave the action sequences in place.  And then wonder why no one likes it.  Actually, that’s not the only reason people don’t like it.  There’s the horrendous acting, abysmal music, awful dialogue…  oh and the bitter taste of resentment and disappointment that it leaves in the mouth as well.

The notes that I jotted down during the film were surprisingly short and to the point.  Usually one or two words to categorise what was on the screen and either “yuk” or “no, just no”.  The TV version of the Avengers has one of the most incredible pieces of theme music ever (easily in the top five TV themes of all time).  So the film makers decided that the film should start with rather less than inspiring pop-art style titles played over the top of very bland music.  Once the action started THEN they play in the proper theme music but a rather insipid lacklustre version to accompany a rather neat little fight sequence.  Ralph Fiennes can fight.  He can’t act.  Well, he clearly can in other films but I have no idea what his reference material for playing John Steed was.  Steed was many things through the TV series (and the New Avengers as well) but a rather charmless, upper class business man with a rod up his arse was never one of them.  Even in the tenser moments, the original John Steed came across as quite relaxed and natural.  Ralph Fiennes is just so stilted in his efforts to play Steed it’s beyond unnatural. Where are the smiles, the laughter and the effortlessness?  I’m guessing in a bin somewhere having been surgically removed before rehearsals began.  Assuming, of course, that there was room in the bin for them as Uma Thurman clearly had the same procedure done to allow her to play Mrs Peel so badly as well.  Pretty much everything to do with this film feels absolutely forced. The relationship that they’re trying to hard to capture (which, by rights, shouldn’t be there as it’s supposed to be their first meeting), the banter, the fact you know they’ve shagged senseless and got it out of their systems, nothing in this film has the naturalness of the original.  The only scene that I put something akin to “getting close” to was when Steed was trying to chat up the very young looking Keeley Hawes.

What makes the lack of naturalness even weirder and more depressing is just how much of the film is lifted almost directly from the TV series.  The fencing between Steed and Peel, the House that Jack Built sequence, the weather obsessed madman and even the reappearance of the one off Father from the last year of the show.  I’m guessing that the random use of giant teddy bear costumes is a nod to the Cathy Gale episode “Mr Teddy Bear”.  The fact that it seems to snow inside the costumes is rather strange, either the explanatory scene was one of the thirty minutes’ worth cut after the first test screening (to working class Spaniards apparently) or it was just an horrendous mistake (like so much of the rest of the film). Eddie Izzard’s only dialogue in the film is a good gag but it’s just NOT The Avengers and the closing music clearly wants to try and emulate Bond (perhaps this would have been a better Bond movie?).

There are a few good set pieces, and you know right from the start of the final fight just how Sean Connery’s villain will meet his maker but they’re just not enough to salvage this utter mess of a movie.  Perhaps, one day, someone will unearth a bootleg of the original cut and we’ll see if the missing footage does actually help the plot make sense.  Perhaps, one day, Hollywood will finally forget this atrocity and make a new and better version (unlikely thanks to bloody Marvel).  Perhaps, one day, there’ll be a decent DVD release of it so I can at least watch some extra features.  Or, most unlikely of all, perhaps one day I’ll forgive this film the ultimate crime.  It’s an awful film that I don’t think I’ll ever really want to watch again.  The script, the acting, the music… all terrible.  But when it was over I still wanted to see another one.  I desperately wanted to know if, in a sequel where the characters actually had a “right” to know each other and be banterous together, things might actually work out.  I wanted Steed and Peel back.  And a terrible film that still leaves me wanting more is something I’m really not prepared to forgive easily.

Beginning Benny - Season 7

Previously on Benny…. We got the good stories out of the way.

Season 7, I’m afraid to say, starts a rather severe downturn in the quality of the Benny audios.  I was mostly up to date with them when they were coming out for the first six years but then fell behind on listening.  I still kept buying them though and had something of a stockpile.  It became habit, Big Finish would announce the next season, I’d pre-order it and then say “I must catch up on the last season… oh, I’m two seasons behind… no three….”  Would I have continued buying them if I had actually managed to stay up to date with them?  Do you know I’m really not sure…

Certainly “The Tartarus Gate” isn’t the strongest opener to the season.  Benny’s trapped in a virtual world (how out dated was that when it came out, it felt excessively behind the times when I listened on this marathon) and there’s a gateway to hell that someone wants to open because they think they can control the gods.  It’s all very shouty, it’s very noisy and it’s really not that enjoyable.  There’s talk of a perfect cube and one of the gods sounded, to me, very Valentine Dyall like but sadly it wasn’t to be.  Jason gets his memory back though at the end and realises what an unpleasant person Brax has been. 

“Timeless Passages” is actually close to being good.  There’s timeywimey done well, a genuinely spooky atmosphere, a very camp homicidal knight and a baby.  Out of all the Benny stories of season 7 it’s the best (yes, faint praise indeed) and it’s certainly one that you need to keep concentrating on to keep up with the jumping around in time (there aren’t any handy “we’ve just changed time period” sound effects so you’ve got to just damn well pay attention) and I couldn’t help think that there were certain aspects of it that had a certain Rivery Songy type feel to them…

Big Finish took a huge risk calling the next one “The Worst Thing In The World”.  Thankfully it does have one redeeming feature (the zombie servant song and dance number caught me completely by surprise) but it feels very much like “well we’ve done a weird reality one every year so far so let’s do another one this year” was the motivation behind it.  It has a few laughs but it’s not particularly subtle and, in places, the acting left a lot to be desired (seemingly bad acting is allowed under certain plot conditions but it the permission doesn’t detract from the fact it’s painful to listen to).  Still, it did have the song and dance number.  That’s more than can be said for the next one.

“Summer of Love” aka “You’ll never get that hour of your life back”.  Everything about this one just felt wrong to me.  The acting was stilted, the dialogue poor and the lame excuse for a plot was so lacklustre that you know full well the planning meeting for it went “We want to do an audio of people shagging and attempting rape, do you think we need to put a decent reason in or can we come up with any old lame explanation”.  Terrible on pretty much every level.

Only marginally better is “The Oracle of Delphi”.  There’s an artefact that Benny’s after.  She runs around in history and tries to make sure that everything that’s supposed to happen still happens and ummmmm she finds the artefact.  I’d love to tell you more about the details of the plot, I’d love to tell you how wonderfully acted or written it was but, even soon after listening to it, most of this one just went from my mind.  I know I listened though but that statement alone is probably the most damning review of it I can muster.

To end the season there’s “The Empire State”.  Benny has an artefact, Benny’s in a place that should have been destroyed and is destroyed again only it isn’t and then it is and then it’s rebuilt around her and… It probably has one of the stronger plots of the season but that doesn’t say much.  The origin of one character, when revealed, sets a sinking feeling about how things are going to end up and yes, you get to the end, and the development you’re presented with is the one you’ve been pretty much expecting since the end of season six.  Still, there’s a nice loud bang at the end of the story which acts, I guess, as a cliff-hanger type hook to get you into season eight.

I really wish I were more enamoured with the seventh season of Benny audios.  It almost felt like six releases of trying to do little more than tread water.  There are very few sparks of originality in there, not particularly large amounts of charm and not really all that much in the way of a plot.  Still, I’m sure that it’s only temporary and when I did get around to completing the stockpile I’d find it was so much better for season eight.  Wouldn’t I?

Beginning Benny - Season 6

Previously on Benny… *Deep breath* Backtogetherwiththeexhusbandstillfriendswithexlovercollectionprotectedsongrowingtroublebrewingneverchangingmovingon…

Right, season six and I freely admit that I’m now starting to get impatient for things to happen.  Okay, there’s been the odd good story (“The Grel Escape”, also a good odd story) but the last few haven’t really done it for me and, more irritatingly, they’ve not yet really picked up on any of the dangling plot threads.  However, some will be dealt with at the end of this season and others will also be picked up soon so it’s sort of finally on the horizon.  Just got a few stories to get through before we get there though, from the good to the mediocre to “The Lost Museum”.

“The Heart’s Desire”, a story I remember being less than enthusiastic about the first time around, turns out to be much better on this new listening.  It might be that, having remembered who the villains turn out to be (do you know, I’m not going to say because if you don’t know it might spoil the surprise) did mean that the first three quarters made a lot more sense and certain bits (with the foreknowledge) were a damn site more fun this time.  Normally I get quite irritated if a “surprise” reappearance is given away on the sleeve notes or the cover but part of me actually thinks that if the listener had been let in on a it a lot sooner then some bits might have been less painful.  I was also convinced, though totally incorrect, that it was Mark Gatiss playing one of the *spoiler* but nope, it just sounds a lot like him.  There’s a lot of light hearted bitchiness going on between two of the characters in this and it reminded me of the Black/White Guardian relationship in the Who stories “Key 2 Time”.  This came first though and, if anything, probably works even better.  What is rather weird though is the decision to make it vaguely a Christmas story.  They could have made a lot more of this, instead it seems to be something of an afterthought, there for no real reason and not even adding much punch to things.  However, it’s rather a pleasant way to spend an hour or so and, if you do work out what’s going on in advance, then well done!

“Kingdom of the Blind”, on the other hand, is a rather straight laced and one note piece.  It’s almost back to traditional Benny, mysterious artefact causes mayhem, Benny and Jason get caught up in it, things come out of the ground but, for this one, we join about a quarter of the way in and get the start in flashbacks towards the middle.  The monsters of the piece are the Monoids… yup, Big Finish have bought back the mop top wobblers from “The Ark” and tried to do something with them, the something being “Genesis of the Monoids”.  This is one of those times when you have to remember that this takes place in the 26^th century or so, a very long time before “The Ark” (a surprisingly long time really, and now I think about it I do wonder just how they survived for so long as a species).  On first listening I was convinced that they’d made a horrendous balls up and allowed the Monoids to speak but I should have had more faith, Big Finish really aren’t that stupid and everything becomes clear at the end.  The plot’s fairly basic, Benny gets caught, Benny spends time in the security kitchen, Benny leads revolution, Benny cocks up spectacularly.  Jason gets carried around a lot as he’s injured (but fortunately he’s healed at the end) and well… it’s probably most notable for bringing back the Monoids and trying to do something with them.  It’s not the worst story ever, it’s not the best either.  I do remember that, when I first got this one, it sent me to sleep rather a lot so perhaps I’m slightly prejudiced against it. After all, it does take a certain amount of guts to bring back possibly the most ridiculous monsters ever!

Quite frankly, even if “Kingdom of the Blind” had been genuinely mediocre I would rather listen to it again and again rather than sit through “The Lost Museum”.  A ghastly mess of a story that’s clearly trying to say things about war in Iraq but doing it with so little subtlety that I was left wondering if this was some kind of “fan fiction contest winner”.  Benny’s off relic recording, Jason’s there to help by providing translators and there are oppressors who cut off Benny’s arm.  We also find out (well, if you only do the audios that is) that Jason has clones (they REALLY need to do a “previously on the printed page” thing somewhere as, by this time, I wasn’t getting the books at all) and that Benny doesn’t mind running around virtually naked when she needs to.  I’m not sure what else I can say about this one that wouldn’t break various terms and conditions about rudeness so I’ll simply say… listen if you feel obliged, I’m not writing any more about it.

Up next is “The Goddess Quandry” and finally, it looks as though things are going to be talked about.  Remember back to the narration in “Death and the Daleks”, well we’re now soon after that (even though it doesn’t feel as though a significant amount of time has passed since then) and Benny is questioned about a few of the things she may or may not have said.  Clearly though she doesn’t want to talk about what happened to Brax, why the collection’s in the state it’s in and… well clearly something rather major has been going on that we don’t know about.  So instead she tells the story of how she went hunting for the God Aldébrath's remains.  It’s a whimsical tale, mostly due to the presence of (a recast and different sounding) Keri Pakhar, but it also questions the nature of religion and deals, in part, with Benny’s Goddess vs the rest of the universe’s God.  Thankfully I’m not particularly religious myself and have always seen it as faintly ridiculous so I’m quite sympathetic to some of the views in this story.  The ending is… well it’s not pure cliché but there wasn’t anything new and startling in the resolution of the God story line.  That’s still more resolution than the story arc part gets though so you’ve got to wait one more release to find out just exactly WHY Brax has vanished along with his rooms in the mansion…

So… “The Crystal of Cantus”.  Brax finally goes over the edge, the cybermen have tombs and the flashbacks are told from different perspectives.  I’m not normally a fan of Joseph Lidster’s work, never really sure why, but this one does manage to utilise the different points of view exceptionally well.  There’s a mysterious message for Benny about a fabled crystal that Jason intercepts.  He talks Brax into going along for the ride, he’s stupid enough to make Benny suspicious and she jumps on board as well and then there’s the scene where we find out what “powers” cybermats.  There’s something evil in the cyber tomb, something that’s waiting for one of the three travellers.  It is, of course, a trap.  And deep down I can sympathise with WHY the trap has been set.  I don’t agree (I’m not that insane) but I know why people do what they do in this one.  The scale of the manipulation is impressive and, surprisingly, not completely unbelievable (the flashbacks are superb at this point when they make you realise how it was all put together) but the main problem is the ending.  It’s not the fault of the release, it’s just that since this came out the ending has been done numerous times on the television.  Yup, the cybermen are defeated by a flood of emotions causing them to blow up.

So that’s the end of Brax for a while.  He got “caught out”.  Jason’s no longer his puppet (I really get the impression that a LOT happens in the books between the two of them as I’m sure I don’t recognise a lot of the comments from the audios) and, as a result, he flees the collection.  He’s not dead, he’s out there somewhere but finally we start to get ramifications.  Cause, at last, has effect (see “Masquerade of Death” for more).  It’s not the worst thing that Brax could have done but it’s still deeply unpleasant.  So what next for the collection?  And there’s still the hints about Peter’s future to deal with.  Season six finally marks a transition point in the range, things have no choice now but to change and change they will…

Beginning Benny - Season 5

Previously on Benny… dog-faced lovers, thieves and ex husbands banded together to protect probably evil Time Lord’s private collection of antiquities from time travelling daleks led by Benny’s father.  Jason got naked, father got mad, daleks got defeated.  Weird stuff with linking narration put it all in the past and Peter still cries a lot.  Try and remember the bit about Brax probably being evil as it won’t come up in this season, it’s a hangover from season three and won’t get dealt with till next year.

So season four, pretty heavy going.  Huge epic dalek battles, Benny being tortured by Draconians and the listeners being tortured by Sea Devils. It’s clear there’s going to be some pretty heavy going stuff ahead (quite a few plots hanging at the moment) which can only mean one thing… time for some inspired silliness.  No, not just inspired but silliness on the genius level.  “The Grel Escape” has one very simple premise.  Take one of the daftest Doctor Who stories ever (“The Chase”) and rework it with Benny, Jason, Peter and Peter’s Grel godmother Sophia… you did read “The Glass Prison” didn’t you… replace Daleks with Grel (as daleks were SO last season) and make it very clear to the audience what you’re doing.  Include “destroy time rings” as part of your brief and set up even more future plot lines (this time suggesting that there are dark things ahead for Peter as he grows up).  In short, produce an audio drama that’s brilliant on pretty much every level.  The robot Benny that looks nothing like her to the extent that even Jason isn’t fooled, Grel rising up out of the sand, ghost trains and time travel all appear but with a knowing wink that leaves casual listeners laughing and Doctor Who fans in hysterics.  There’s a rather strange section in the middle that’s almost deadly serious (involving Egyptian Gods judging Peter, clearly setting things up for the future) but, for the most part, the jokes come thick and fast.  There are a few odds from “The Daleks’ Master Plan” in there as well (the football match sequence is the weakest part of the release sadly as the commentator’s voice is too recognisable as also being the Grel voice) but mostly this is an audio tribute to daftness, with just a few hints of sorrow in there to play with your minds a little.

Sadly the same can’t be said for “The Bone of Contention”.  To understand this one fully, it helps if you’ve heard the Doctor Who audio “The Sandman”.  If you haven’t then don’t worry as it’s pretty much all contained somewhere in the story.  Benny’s caught in the middle of some rather delicate diplomatic relations.  The Perloran’s want their bone back but the Galyari aren’t prepared to return it. There are myths and legends about the power of the bone but no one will admit to knowing where it is.  There’s also a child with extreme growing pains that latches on to Benny as a surrogate mother. It’s all very corridor based (if you’ve heard “The Sandman” then you’ll recognise the Clutch as being a 50/50 mix of corridors and ships) so it’s not very surprising.  Also, if you’ve heard “The Sandman” then you’ll remember that the Clutch isn’t the most action packed place in the universe and this story is no exception.  The voices are modulated to just the right side of being able to understand them, Mordecan (the trader) gives a charming insight into the Irish accent but it takes a very long time to get going.  Everything is also a little too obvious.  The location of the bone is guessable quite early in and nothing really took me by surprise in the story.  It’s not bad as such but it’s just a little tedious.

“The Relics of Jegg-Sau” (don’t know why but I don’t like the name for some reason) goes for the surprise return rather than a predictable old monster coming back.  The (giant) Robot, from the fourth Doctor’s first story, makes a reappearance and, unusually, it seems fully justified in its return.  You might be wondering just how the robot comes back (given that it was rusted to death in its only onscreen appearance) but it is explained in the story well enough as to be believable.  Benny finds herself crashing whilst looking for lost treasure and is rescued by Kalwell and his daughter, Elise.  The acting from the guest cast, whilst technically “correct” does mean that there are times that you struggle to stay awake through it and there’s the same issue as in “The Draconian Rage” (weapon from a museum ends up being used to kill someone) which does make things a little predictable towards the end (as does the fact that the Robot grows, they would probably have had complaints if it didn’t).  It’s not a bad release but just a little long winded again.  Michael Kilgariff just about gets the robot correct after quite some absence from Who and the twist at the end isn’t signposted too obviously through the rest of the tale but, even so, it’s just too slow for my brain to want to focus on it for over an hour.

Sitting somewhere between this and the last release of the season is a DWM freebie, “Silver Lining”.  It’s an odd tale of a buried cyber-city, a bomb about to go off and a very gullible cyberman.  Its purpose will become obvious eventually but for now, enjoy it for what it is.  Half an hour of running around cyber corridors, logic puzzles in the form of music and ummm yeah, that’s actually about it.

So finally there’s “Masquerade of Death”, or “Oh No It Isn’t Again” as my mind wants to think about it.  Benny and Adrian are in the rather surreal world of the season based prisons.  There’s a murder that seemingly has no victim and an overall style that says “We want to be weird and wacky” but actually came over as “We’re not exactly sure what this is trying to be” but it sounds like the Who story “Axis of Insanity”.  The baddie, known only as The Player is very similar in sound to the jester from Axis and the unreal world that Benny and Adrian are in is almost reminiscent of “The Mind Robber”.  It’s very difficult to listen to and concentrate on though (okay, others may find it easier but I found it very hard going) and after about half way though it starts to feel exceptionally repetitive. When there’s the eventual reveal of what’s actually going on at the end I couldn’t help but think it was a case of “let’s come up with an ending of some sort and we’ll get around to dealing with it later, maybe”.  Apparently Benny had been trapped in some sort of sentient book and suspected that it had been a trap designed especially for her.  For a trap it seemed overly elaborate and unnecessarily complicated (so, on that front, I guess it ties in with a lot of Who etc) but I didn’t really buy it.  The opening of the story also serves to highlight something that really is becoming something of an issue in the range.  Looking back over the last few seasons, Benny’s been tortured, chased, seen her home invaded and had it suggested that her son isn’t going to be a nice person.  Yet she still seems… well, Benny.  Nothing about her seems to have changed, she doesn’t seem to have been affected that much by things and everything seems to be reset at the end of every story.  I hadn’t actually considered this that much, until this story went out of its way to point it out…. Ooooops.

So that was season 5.  Not Benny’s finest set of stories, one clear highlight and an awful lot of missed opportunities.  Or, in the case of Masquerade, opportunities that weren’t even really there to begin with.

The 14 Days of A (1)

The Avengers

Okay, so starting with “A” means that the start of the two weeks on this letter gets off to an almost guaranteed brilliant start with four episodes of The Avengers.  My original plan had been to go for four episodes I’ve not seen or hadn’t seen that many times but things got a little changed for the second episode I picked.  Anyway, starting with a season two episode (it’s the season I only got on DVD a short while ago and still haven’t fully worked through), I decided it was time for a Venus revisiting. 

Venus Smith seems to get a bad press a lot of the time but I really rather like her.  There’s something about Steed having a singing sidekick that already sets The Avengers aside from other spy series.  The Avengers always had style but what little I’ve seen and heard about season one suggests it might have been far more run of the mill than future years.  Season two, the season of many side kicks, has a bit more of a sense of fun about it (probably because Steed “discovers” female company).  “School for Traitors” is still, at heart, a rather bog standard story of public school, spies, deadly face cream and lizards.  Not in that order and with a few upper class accents in there as well but hell, it’s quite a fluffy romp.  It was chosen mostly at random and I didn’t actually have very high expectations for it but it easily kept me entertained for 50 minutes or so. Perhaps every series should have their own night club singer popping up every now and then to liven things up!

I’d planned to do a Cathy Gale that I wasn’t too familiar with but then I remembered it’s just been New Year’s Eve (how could I forget that???) so I plumped for the rather brilliant “Dressed to Kill”.  There’s a party (there’s always a party in Steed’s life but this time we get to see it), there’s fancy dress, there’s Leonard Rossiter and government secrets.  By season three we’re definitely into the spies with style territory but this one is more Agatha Christie than James Bond but it just oozes Avengers charm.  It also got “reworked” into an Emma Peel story called “The Superlative Seven” so, of course, I just had to watch that one next.  Amazingly, even with the presence of Brian Blessed in the cast, I didn’t have to reach for the volume control once!  Steed’s at another party (this time on a plane rather than the black and white train) and it’s a similar premise (invite from an old friend but everyone got invited by different people) but this one is much more brutal. People get stabbed, shot, run down… all kinds of grisly deaths get delivered in “And Then There Were None” style.  It’s good fun trying to guess who the killer’s going to be (ummmm, if you’ve not seen it before, best forget I just made that ATTWN comparison) and Donald Sutherland is VERY creepy at times. 

Miss King wears a blond wig, well she needs to so that the old and new footage mixes together well to form “Invasion of the Earthmen”.  It’s weird.  Seriously weird.  There’s a training ground with spacemen, students trying to kill each other and a spinning mobile that I’m guessing is supposed to be a solar system but looks more like a Christmas tree ornament. Astronaut soldiers are being trained so that humans can take over other worlds.  Successful solders get cryogenically frozen and unsuccessful ones get fed to snakes.  For a Tara King episode it’s surprisingly dark, well it’s green and purple décor but it’s quite a bleak episode on the grounds I can see it being the sort of thing that certain powers might even consider.  I was expecting lightness and daftness from Tara, I forgot what the original premise had been.  An unexpectedly militaristic end to the night… but a damn good night it was.

Next time…. More stuff beginning with “A”.  Might go for a movie next time.  No.  I couldn’t.  I mean I’ve given up the drink, I couldn’t possibly do that sober… could I?

The Start of "14 Days of..."

Right, I have several New Year's Resolutions and this year I plan to stick to them (sticking to them being the first resolution).  The ones you need to know about are
1) update this blog more often
2) finish Benny
3) go through my stupidly large DVD collection and re-watch loads of it.

1 leads nicely into 2 and I figure that 3 might as well feed in as well.  I could, of course, just pick things at random off the shelf to watch but that doesn't seem to tie in with the way my brain works.  If it works that is. So I thought I'd try and find some sort of way of keeping things mixed up (so I actually keep watching stuff rather than just pick one series etc).  So I figured I might as well do them in some sort of order... alphabetical order.  Ish.

52 weeks to the year, 26 letters to the alphabet... so that's two weeks per letter. And as we've just had the 12 Days of Christmas (well, we're still having them as I write but they'll soon be over) so why not go for "The 14 Days of...."  So, over the next two weeks I'll be randomly re-watching things beginning with the letter A, then the two weeks after that I'll be re-watching things beginning with B and so on.  The two weeks of Q might involve a LOT of Quatermass but we'll see what happens when I get there.  They won't be in alphabetical order within the letter, that would be obscenely complicated.... but random TV and movies beginning with that letter.

I'm also feeling very lazy tonight, so "The 14 Days of A" begins with....

Beginning Benny - Season 4

Right then, where are we?  Benny’s a single mother but with an ex-husband and an ex-loverofBennywhilstshewasn’tinherbody fighting over both her affections and also those of her son, the hairy scream ball Peter.  Brax looks as though he’s far more evil than anyone thought but only Jason knows it, except for the hypnotic block Brax has put in place to stop him remembering.  The universe is a pretty peaceful place though at the moment but there’s trouble ahead, to be detailed in those pesky paper based book things.  So, time to start season 4.  It’s begins with one giant green testicle and end with something approaching a load of bollocks…

“The Bellotron Incident” guest stars a rutan (so see the Doctor Who TV story “Horror of Fang Rock”) which you know means that there’s going to be all manner of shape changing larks going on through the story.  We get to reintroduce Bev Tarrant to the audio range (go listen to the Doctor Who audio story “The Genocide Machine” and then do “Dust Breeding” just for the hell of it) and Benny gets to re-enact Indiana Jones style escapades.  It’s a bit of a strange one, some people might say “where’s the fun in shape shifters in audio only” but it’s done exceptionally well here.  The opening goes on for far too long though (it could easily lose several minutes’ worth of monologue) and some of the set pieces are, I’m sorry to say, just a little bit too cliché on the daring archaeology front.  However, it’s a story with more than one or two twists to it and not all of them are immediately obvious.  There’s a rather sneaky moment towards the end where it really looks as though Benny’s been killed (but she’s the heroine) so you are left scratching your head for a moment or two before the big reveal (note:  this is how you should do it Mr Moffat!).  We’re once more in the realms of small casts (presumably saving up for the end of season spectacular) but everyone plays it at just the right level to keep it interesting. And there’s no sign of Brax being anything but charming in this one.

He’s also fairly charming at the start of “The Draconian Rage” (don’t remember the Draconians? Go re-watch the Doctor Who story “Frontier in Space”, and when you’ve woken up come back to this one).  Here he talks Benny into the archaeology opportunity of a lifetime, to inspect an artefact that the Draconians have recently unearthed.  The Draconians don’t go a bundle on humans, or females, so why they have specifically asked Brax to send them the human, female Benny is something of a mystery (one which you can get a little more of the background on in the Doctor Who audio story “The Dark Flame”).  Be warned though, the level of lisping in this story is kept to the correct side of the line but there are some very disturbing scenes of what essentially boils down to almost sadistic torture.  Think back to how the Nazis treated Benny in “Just War” and now make it worse.  Plus throw in the appropriate sound effects.  Don’t expect to be cheery by the end of it.  Also, don’t expect to be surprised when the weapon introduced near the start of the story does exactly what you expect to do near the end of the story.  The only challenge is in working out who’s going to use it and who’s going to be on the receiving end.  It’s a psychological tale of mind control vs free will and there’s a lot of talking towards the end rather than action.  Also, don’t expect there to be any real signs of it being referred back to any time in the near future (though more of this when it’s possibly referenced in a season or two’s time). Just take it as a story that’s going to make you grimace at the nasty bits, struggle through a lot of the talky bits and presumably have a lot of off air downtime for Benny after it.

So, some suitable time later, Benny has headed off to visit an old friend in “The Poison Seas”. Well, officially she’s just visiting, in reality she’s there to find out what’s going on after a tip off that things aren’t all as they seem.  Her old friend, it turns out, is a sea devil (so go see the TV story “The Sea Devils” for more information) and ummmm well this is one of those rare instances where Big Finish get it wrong.  Sea Devils were great on television, they looked superb and there was a lot of other stuff going on in the story and the devils weren’t doing too much of the talking.  On audio though, things really don’t work too well. The sea devil voices all merge into one another and, at times, I found it really difficult to actually work out what was being said by whom.  So, what I gathered about the plot, weird sentient protein driving the leader of the sea devils a bit nuts even though he was a traitor anyway, might have been a bit fuzzed by the heavy use of sea devil voices.  They just really don’t work on audio.  The plot itself isn’t actually that strong and so my willingness to really focus on the sea devil voices wandered on a regular basis.  It’s a shame, under different circumstances (and maybe with a slightly more generous treatment of the voices), this could have been a gripping mystery tale.  As it stands, what I could hear, all of it sounded pretty obvious.  Except the ending that is.  The baddies are defeated, the authorities called in and then Brax sends Benny a message.  A message so obviously a coded message that Benny has no choice but to abandon the sea devils to their off air fate and head back to the Braxiatel Collection pronto.  Well, that’s her intended destination… in reality she ends up very heavily involved in a short story collection in the book range.  And if you don’t read it then the opening of the season finale is going to be something of a jumbled mess.

“Death and the Daleks”, at long last, starts with a “Previously on Benny” as the story follows on from the end of the short story collection “Life During Wartime”.  However, it’s done in such a confusing manner and with little indication as to what’s actually going on then it’s almost worse than useless.  The audio release really feels like parts two and three of a story where most of the information you needed to really understand it was in part one.  Okay, there have been references to the books in the past but they kept things mostly explained in the audios.  Here there’s a whole tonne of stuff that’s happened on the printed page that just baffled me (I didn’t get the book till long after the audio was released and I’ll be damned if I can remember what actually happens in it).  Jason’s in a fat suit and still in contact with his mysterious friends, the Briaxiatel Collection has been invaded by the Fifth Axis and Brax strongly suspects there’s a lot more to the invasion than seems.  There’s a whole host of familiar faces in this one, they’ve certainly pulled out the stops on the cast front (eleven listed on the official Big Finish page for the story) but the plot really feels as though it should either have been shorter and some of the padding removed OR made a lot longer and put a lot more explanation in.  There are references back to the “Benny travelling with the Doctor” days (so time wasn’t 100% re-written in “Closure”) and finally the daleks show up in the range (don’t know who the daleks are, then what on earth are you doing listening to Benny dramas??).  Brax now openly has a TARDIS (Chronotis style, see “Shada”) and there’s a linking narration to help fill in some bits that I can’t quite work out when it takes place (it will crop up again in a couple of years though… and I still won’t be able to work it out).  It feels as though the linking material is set about ten years or more after the occupation by the axis but that doesn’t really tie in with other stories. I’m not saying it’s a bad story, it does feel very large scale and there’s a lot of things going on in it, but starting the story in the book range really felt like a mistake to me.  Yes, you could follow what was going on but there was just so much back referencing that I kept finding my mind pulled out of it to see if I knew what was happening!  The moralising about right and wrong all through the story came across as heavy handed and, at the end, I was left feeling exhausted but not in a brilliant way.  Large scale, daleks and continuity but it didn’t quite add up to the feast it thought it was.  Plus another set of clues that things are about to go wrong for the Collection that won’t be picked up for another season or two.

Beginning Benny - Season 3

So Benny’s given birth to Peter, the child she conceived whilst her body was being possessed by an ancient sorceress who promptly bone jumped Adrian, the dog-man-like handyman on the Braxiatel Collection.  The kid has a rather powerful scream (mentioned quite a lot through the season but never really explained on audio) and a few extra claws but is otherwise fairly normal.  This means that, from now on, as well as ancient weapons, insane computers, Nazis and all the other things she’s had to worry about whilst being on her adventures, Benny’s now rather pre-occupied with being a good mother as well.  As you can possibly imagine, this isn’t something that’s going to come too naturally to her. So, at the start of season three, we get to join Benny in doing something that really is her basic instinct… and it’s not archaeology.

Remember the original “tag line” of Benny stories, that science fiction had never been so much fun?  Well the first release “The Greatest Shop in the Galaxy” really lives up to the promise.  We’re back to the classic Benny set-up, ie archaeological dig gone wrong.  It’s Benny’s own fault though, she deliberately volunteered for this dig and the fact it takes place in the car park of Gigamarket, the largest shop in the galaxy, is a complete and utter coincidence.  The fact that she’s accidentally borrowed Adrian’s credit chip is mere fate and Benny would never dream of taking the opportunity to stock up on shoes. Accompanied by the robot porter Joseph (go read the books), Benny leaves the archaeology robots on auto and happens to pop into the store just as things start to go wrong with time.  This is possibly one of the best (though thoroughly inconsistent) time travel type stories I can think of in the Doctor Who universe (“Festival of Death”, to my mind, being the ultimate and practically perfect one) and, as a result, has some fantastically grotesque scenes involving cows.  The sequence never fails to make me break into a huge grin and I won’t spoil any more by going into detail.  Naturally Benny gets drawn into the whole “what’s going on” plot and it turns out there’s a rather nasty side to the store and a bloody large bomb about to go off.  Did I mention this story does time travel?  Well it also dares to include the Grandfather Paradox in a rather literal manner and fully acknowledge how ludicrous the situation is.  It’s a glorious triumph and should be added to the rather small but satisfyingly enjoyable pile of “stories that everyone should hear”.

Up next, and catching me totally by surprise, comes “The Green-Eyed Monster”. Adrian, the biological father of Peter, ends up in direct competition with Jason Kane, the ex-husband of Benny, for her affections in a plot that I remembered as being rather lacklustre when I first heard it but thoroughly enjoyed this time around.  Benny heads away from the Braxiatel collection to authenticate some artefacts to allow Lady Ashantra and her insane sons to take the reigns on a planet that, to be honest, no one really cares about. If the artefacts are genuine then the rather idiotic children will find their eyes flashing green and so be seen as the true holders of power.  However Benny doesn’t really see this as a job that she should be taking her still screaming son on and so she needs baby sitters.  The green-eyed monsters of the title refers to both the genetically altered children and the bitch fest that is the Jason/Adrian relationship that takes up half the story.  No sooner has Benny left Peter in their charge than the poor infant is captured.  The story is a brilliantly written tale which doesn’t even bother to hide the obviousness of what’s going on after about the first 25 minutes and, instead, concentrates on characters.  My only gripe about the story though is the ending.  There’s nothing wrong with it, it makes sense and you can follow what’s going on BUT there’s a huge amount of background information that I really don’t remember about Jason.  At some point in whichever time line we’re actually in these days, he’s clearly first gone missing and then turned up again.  This is definitely a “Previously on Benny” moment and I spent a long time afterwards trying to decide if I should go back to the books and get the details.  In the end I decided not to but as it’s going to crop up again in a slightly more important manner later on in the range… well I think I’ll just google it and hope for the best.  However, as I said, the story does make sense without it as they give just enough information to justify what’s going on.

No such background about Jason is needed for “Dance of the Dead”.  Instead, this time, you need background on Benny’s other adventures.  As a crossover release, Benny appeared in “The Plague Heards of Excelis”, not officially part of any Benny season but a fourth part to a trilogy of Doctor Who stories set on the planet Excelis. In it, she was joined by adventuress Iris Wildthyme, a character that I have very mixed feelings about.  At the end though, Benny and Iris head off together for a drink and it’s the aftermath that “Dance of the Dead” picks up with.  Benny has a hangover, a very bad hangover.  One so bad that she doesn’t really remember how she got to be on board a spaceship full of dignitaries heading back to their home worlds after a potentially galaxy saving peace conference.  Fortunately, Karter, a helpful steward takes pity and smuggles her into the VIP area in time to meet some ice warriors and for the ship to blow up…  Yes, it’s Benny does “The Poseidon Adventure”.  There’s a rather trippy love story in this one between Benny and an Ice Warrior to go with it, but the bulk of the actual plot is the desperate race to try and get off the ship before it blows completely (the initial explosion merely taking out part of it).  There are escapades in lift shafts, double and triple crossing, collapsing ceilings and everything else you’d expect from a disaster movie.  Where this story really wins me over (and if anyone from Big Finish is reading this, unlikely I know, but please take note) is that the Ice Warriors aren’t voiced by Nicholas Briggs.  In recent years it’s become something of a joke that any alien race that was originally in the TV version of Doctor Who is now automatically voiced by Nick Briggs in the audio dramas.  Sadly he does seem to have an exceptionally recognisable voice no matter how much distortion they put on it.  This, though, comes from the pre-Nickvoiceseverything days and, as such, we get a very distinctive sounding Grand Marshall for Benny to act against (as well as a female of the species for the Grand Marshall to play off as well).  It just makes it sound refreshingly different and the portrayal, combined with the love story being acted out, really pulled me into the tale.  The ending, however, though signalled in the middle of the story, still always strikes me as rather convenient.  Okay, it’s clear that Benny can’t die and so needs rescuing but… I can’t quite put my finger on it but I think it borders on being close to a Deus ex Machina.  Still, it’s a very good listen and a very different tone to the previous two. 

If only the season had ended there.  If only the final, letter writing scene could have been picked up on for the next release instead of “The Mirror Effect”, a story about mirrors, setting Brax up as a nasty piece of work and ummm lots of running around in corridors and mirrors.  I wouldn’t describe this story as a clunker but it’s definitely the weakest release they’d done to this point in the range. It’s a lot of tediousness involving a mirror entity who shows people their dark sides, wants to give birth and lives in a deserted mining base.  There’s a lot of snow and water involved (including Jason thinking he’s drowning in a sealed lift) and there’s a lot more of the Jason/Adrian fighting over Benny.  Sadly it’s so straight laced it’s tedious.  They really do go to great lengths to make Brax out as a baddie (but, with a throwforward for those who don’t mind slight spoilers, don’t really do much with it for a few years at least) and Jason and Adrian as insecure males who both have feelings for Benny.  I’d love to say that I really understood the nature of the mirror creature (but I don’t), I’d love to say that it’s all designed and written well enough to keep my interest (it isn’t) and I’d love to say that anything that happens in this one is completely irrelevant to the rest of the range.  Sadly, it’s the start of the BIG plot line.  I mean BIG, not just in block caps but with neon lights around it and flashing arrows saying “Remember this one because you’ll need it later”.  Listen to it, get it out of the way and then grit your teeth for a while longer as you’ve got a few more dreary releases to get through before science fiction gets fun again. 

Beginning Benny - Season 2

I’ve decided that, for the purposes of the next ten seasons of Benny’s adventures, time did get a slight rebooting at the end of the subscriber story “Closure”.  If you don’t know what I’m referring to then nip over to the Intermission article about Benny then come back here once you’re done… Ready?

So this is Bernice Surprise Summerfield’s “first” full blown series of original audio adventures.  No reworking of old stories, everything is new.  However, it’s also the first time that Big Finish decided that Benny should be a “cross product” range.  In their infinite wisdom they decided that you should have to get both the book series AND the audio series to get the full story and, in going back to the start of Benny it’s left me scrabbling for the internet to get a memory jog of things that don’t take place on CD.  Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to piece together what you’ve missed if you’re only interested in the audio format but a “Previously on Benny” might have been a little useful towards the end of the range.

“The Secret of Cassandra” stands out a little in this second season as being the only non “archaeology as a starting point” story.  Instead we find Benny having slight issues whilst on holiday.  Even though she’s no longer travelling with a certain Time Lord she hasn’t lost the knack of ending up in trouble and, in this particular case, she’s ended up holidaying in the middle of a war zone.  Not the safest thing to do and Benny’s essentially left adrift without a paddle.  Fortunately there’s a ship to pick her up, Captained by Big Finish stalwart Lennox Greaves.  He’ll eventually crop up in all kinds of Big Finish Doctor Who stories, most obviously in “The Chimes of Midnight”, but here he’s keeping one or two secrets from his new ship mate.  Also on the ship is General Brennan, a representative of one of the sides in the war, her prisoner, Sheen and a computer called Cassandra.  Not the largest cast in the world but they manage to keep the story going at a pretty reasonable rate, with enough plot developments to keep your mind working though the story.  The ending is a little bit gender bending (but nothing compared to what wouldn’t be happening soon in the CDs) and they manage to play out the emotional part of the story without it becoming too heavy handed.  Oh and there’s nothing in it that you need the books for, it’s a stand alone adventure and takes place before the novel “The Squire’s Crystal”.  And if you’ve never read that then the next set of stories are going to be a little bit weird.

“The Stone’s Lament” picks up where Squire left off.  Benny’s dog-man non-lover Adrian (look, I said things would get weird) is accompanying Benny on a chance to visit a rather unique archaeological dig at which several of his colleagues have already gone missing.  Sadly, Bratheen Traloor, the owner of the lump of rock she’s there to look at is one of those “lived away from the rest of society for numerous decades” people and, as such, doesn’t have the greatest social skills when dealing with people.  It doesn’t help that his only companion in his home is the house computer, a rather jealous and possessive device that fancies its owner.  Sadly, the owner fancies Benny, as does Adrian (even though Benny makes it very clear she’s not interested) and this just pushes the computer a little too far.  Aided by the fact that the house is made up of haunted stones, the computer sets out to deal with the love problems and get rid of Benny.  There’s poltergeist activity, voice mimicry and all kinds of other shenanigans  to deal with but by the end of the release I did start to feel that the story was dragging on just that little too long.  The computer had thrown its voice just once too often, there were a few too many things being thrown around and at the characters and slightly too much computer/human rivalry to keep things moving at a fast pace.  Having said that though, it’s by no means a bad story but, coming straight after Cassandra, it’s a little weird to have two “computer has issues” stories right next to each other.

And so onto “The Extinction Event”.  I need to go back and find my CD of this one (I’ve been doing these on my iPod at the gym) as it sounded as though it had rather weird sound design which meant that the character of Brax sounded as though he was speaking from another room.  Brax, by the way, is Benny’s boss and, in this story, he’s getting Benny to check out the authenticity of a Halsted harp that’s come up for auction at “The Extinction Event”.  The event’s so named as all of the pieces involved have come from civilisations that have been wiped out at some point and so are seen as highly prized.  Brax, who runs the Braxiatel Collection (his own private museum sort of thing), doesn’t want to spend money unless the harp’s genuine.  Things get complicated when the harp’s “owner” nearly dies at the hands of the last surviving member of the Halstead race and, as it just so happens to transpire, the harp’s real owner.  I hadn’t re-listened to this one too much since it came out on CD but I remembered the plot developments for pretty much every stage as I was going through it this time which has to be a good thing.  That’s not to say it’s a perfect release, on top of the potential sound issues there were some bits that I really didn’t think worked (the joke about expletive at the end wasn’t particularly funny the first time they used it and they then used it repeatedly for several minutes), the voice at the start is too obviously Lisa Bowerman (meaning it’s very easy to guess where several bits of the story are going to go) and it does seem a little obvious what the baddies are doing. Plus, listening so soon after Stones it means that there’s another love issue going on involving Bennybutnotbenny.

The season ends with “The Sky Mines of Karthos” which isn’t exactly an earth shattering story.  A now rather heavily pregnant Benny (you REALLY need to read The Squire’s Crystal) gets a message from Caitlin, an old acquaintance, saying that she’s discovered something rather unusual and would Benny come and help her investigate.  When Benny arrives though, she’s gone and, Michael, her less than wonderful partner is left to have to deal with a slightly less than tactful Benny.  Unlike the previous three releases, I didn’t remember too much of this one at all.  I remembered the idea of radioactive elements being harvested from the sky, I just about remembered the cave systems and I just about remembered the flying creatures.  What the significance of it all was though came as a “surprise” at the end though so I’m guessing it either made no impact on me when I listened to it first time around or I didn’t make it to the end conscious (I’ve been known to fall asleep to the less enthralling releases from time to time and don’t always remember to redo the endings).

There’s one other thing to mention about the season.  It’s rather a large thing as they redid the theme music.  Season one had a rather punchy brassy and bold theme which really suited the range well.  Sadly they decided to replace it with an actual theme song. I’m not entirely sure why they decided to make the change, I’m not entirely sure who decided that this would be the one they used but, whoever it was, really needs their heads examined.  The most complimentary thing I can say about it is that it’s awful, I mean really truly and utterly awful. As soon as you hear it start on any release, fast forward about 70 seconds and your ears will be forever grateful.

For the first of the “new” sounding Benny stories, this season is pretty successful.  There aren’t any really bad stories, everything is at least a vaguely enjoyable listen and once you get over the fact that there’s a lot going on between the stories most things are just about filled in.  So I suggest you now go and read up on “The Glass Prison” or season three is going to be just a little confusing…

Beginning Benny - Intermission

Before there was the annual “Subscriber Bonus” story from Big Finish’s Doctor Who range…. Well actually before there was a Big Finish Doctor Who range at all…. There was a bonus CD.  If you demonstrated that you had faith in the fledgling company and were willing to pre-order the Time Ring Trilogy that formed half of the first season then you got an extra CD called “Buried Treasures”.  At this stage it offered people something that there hadn’t been before in the form of original audio material for Benny that wasn’t adapted from a book. Admittedly it was two short stories (and a collection of music and interviews) but still, brand new Benny material that showcased the extreme ends of the Benny range, fun science fiction comedy and heart wrenching drama.  Plus, and whether this was the intention or not I have no idea, it also offered a get out clause that essentially allowed them to reboot the range and move on…

Comedy first and a story called “Making Myths” which takes the form of a “live” broadcast where Benny and a Pakhar called Keri take us back through one of Benny’s most important archaeological finds.  Only Benny doesn’t really remember the full details.  Or know if they’re actually in the right spot.  Or on the right planet… This is very much “science fiction has never been so much fun” territory.  Lisa Bowerman playfully skips her way through the banter between Benny and a giant hamster (lifted from the Virgin novels but works oh so well in audio) and there’s bitching about Jason Kane (which feels very real, not that I’ve ever had ex’s to bitch about of course) and a lot of mud.  The mud actually plays a surprisingly large part in the story and the ending is so daft that it’s brilliant.  It has the same atmosphere as “Oh No It Isn’t” and it just rattled by leaving me with a massive smile on my face.

“Closure”, on the other hand, is the short story equivalent of “Just War”.  Emotional, difficult to listen to at times (at one point the description of torture sailed very close to the line) and giving Benny some very difficult decisions to make, the story sees Benny setting out to change time.  Yes, Benny has both the time rings again, and has gone back to the start of a huge war to try and put things right… It’s hard to say how I feel about this one as the central story and the performances are outstanding but the concept just feels very strange.  It’s written by Paul “Creator of Benny” Cornell, so therefore you can’t really say that it’s out of character for her but having listened to everything else since, it’s something of a weird one.  Is Benny really the sort of person who’d nip back to try and completely change a war?  She didn’t go back and stop WWII (surely that must have been tempting) or any number of other wars so why this one?  What really pushed Benny to do it?  It’s superbly acted, very well written but it’s an uncomfortable one to think about.  Though it does allow something rather cunning.

We don’t know if Benny succeeded at the end of “Closure”, the ending hangs ambiguously and you could interpret her success or failure in any number of ways.  However, taken in the bigger picture, “Closure” does serve a potentially useful role.  Two of the season one stories weren’t really Benny stories, they were Doctor Who ones that Big Finish made “slight” modifications to so that they could be released (removing the Doctor, Ace and other companions for starters) which means that Benny couldn’t, up to to this point, have one coherent timeline.  She’d remember being tortured by the Nazis and spot that ancient London had already been menaced by alien killers before.  So “Closure”, as an ending to season one, could be seen as an “Okay, let’s reboot things now before they get too difficult” statement.  Suppose Benny does succeed.  Suppose that time has now been changed and Benny’s time with the Doctor somehow bypassed that trip to Germany.  It means that the Benny universe is free to start things again with their own rules and their own take on things.  It’s been great hearing some of the early books again but it’s time to move on and season two is probably the start of what we now see as Benny.  She’s got her own audio life ahead of her, with a few books thrown in to bugger things up, and a chance to set sail into new waters…

The Cartoon Museum Doctor Who Exhibition

Pretty much every Tom, Dick and Harry Sullivan has been writing reviews of the Doctor Who Experience at Earl’s Court.  What not quite so many people have been talking about, which is a great shame, is a much smaller (and less interactive) Doctor Who exhibit at London’s Cartoon Museum (www.cartoonmuseum.com).  Admittedly it’s probably mostly of interest to slightly more dedicated Doctor Who fans (though they have tried to put various things out for younger fans to draw on) but it’s certainly a half hour or so that you really should try and see before the end of the month (when it closes).

The comic strip has always been something that I’ve always been exceptionally fond of and it’s the first part of Doctor Who Magazine that I turn to.  So the chance to see a wide selection of original artwork is something that I really didn’t want to miss.  I collect the original artwork myself but I’ve only got a selection from rather a “narrow” era (mostly sixth and seventh Doctor strips) so, for me, this was a chance to expand my horizons and see far more.  And there’s a lot more to see than I was expecting.  Apart from the staggeringly good Lee Sullivan artwork that forms the first wall of the display (a Usual Style line up of twelve Doctors, including Peter Cushing) there’s something from every Doctor and a lot more than just comic strips.  The first Doctor has, for me, one of the highlights of the exhibition.  Coming from the first annual, there’s a black and white piece of artwork of William Hartnell standing on an alien world.  If you’ve got the annual then you should know the piece but you will only have seen the colour version that they printed.  The exhibition has the original black and white version and it’s so much more detailed than the rather vibrantly over coloured version you’ll be used to.  Admittedly the sixties isn’t represented hugely (which is hardly surprising, I’m surprised they have any originals at all) but there is also a panel from Road to Conflict, one of the dalek only strips of the era.

The seventies is really where the exhibition picks up the story, there’s a cover panel from the third Doctor story “Steel Fist”, artwork from the Doctor Who Omnibus (including the rather striking Genesis of the Daleks piece) and also examples of the Radio Times illustrations that accompanied the stories.  I really wasn’t expecting to see these as I’d been expecting pure comic strip material so the chance to see Radio Times material I’d not seen (such as The Daemons) was an unexpected bonus.  There are a few Tom Baker pieces from the pre-Marvel days along with some of the comic strip material from the annuals (oh the days of the “can you guess who it’s meant to be” artwork, how I miss them).  Reaching the end of the seventies and you get to the Dave Gibbons days of Doctor Who Weekly.  City of the Damned, The Time Witch, Dragon’s Claw… the glory days of four or five page instalments are there on the wall for all to see.  Moving along to the eighties and you get a selection from the Davison years with Tides of Time being the highlight (it would have been very difficult to do comic strips without something from this magnificent tale).  I have to admit that as the 80s and early 90s are where most of my own collection comes from I moved through that section quite quickly but it’s an era that lots of fans are very fond of.

It’s not just Marvel in the 90s.  Presented as part of the exhibition are frames from the Radio Times comic strip sitting alongside eighth Doctor material from The Flood, The Autonomy Bug and also some double page spreads from The Glorious Dead (amongst others).  Also appearing at this end of the exhibit are pieces of artwork that were used to publicise Big Finish audio releases along with the “Past Doctor” strips that Marvel ran once they stopped using the seventh Doctor.  What you also get to see are comparisons of the black and white artwork along with the colourised versions that got published.  This is even more interesting when you get to the “modern” Doctors (nine onwards) where the strips were published in colour and the black and white artwork will have been unseen by pretty much everyone.  There’s also artwork that accompanied stories from the annuals of the new millennium and a cover from the Vworp Vworp fanzine.

Okay, space wise, the exhibition doesn’t take up masses of floor space but there’s a hundred or so works on display from the very start of Who to the most up to date eleventh Doctor stories.  There are well written captions for all the works and then there’s also the reset of the museum, a room of political satire and an upper storey (with a kids’ room) of generalised comic strip artwork from Dan Dare to Dennis the Menace.  It’s a small museum but it deserves a visit, if enough people go then they might get to do another one in time to introduce Doctor number twelve, whenever that might be.

Beginning Benny - Season 1

A friend and I occasionally try and get together on MSN and watch DVDs together.  Hey, he's in Manchester and I'm in Norfolk so it's the only way we can do things together without taking out another mortgage to buy a train ticket.  So a while back, something in the order of months, he suggested that we start listening to the audio adventures of Bernice Surprise Summerfield from the start.  And finally, it's begun...

It’s really hard to believe that Benny is twenty years old.  Okay, say that to her face and she’d be exceptionally flattered as she’s usually portrayed as somewhere in mid thirties, but as a character she first appeared on the page in 1991. So this seems as good a time as any to go back to the start of the range and revisit her audio life.  Note the word “audio” in there, I’m not sure how I’ll deal with the bits that you need to read to understand the ongoing story, I’ll work that out when I get there an probably bitch about it when I do. However, as the very first release is not just my favourite Benny but also one of my favourite audio dramas, I’ll save most of the claws for later on. Meanwhile, it’s panto time!

“Oh No It Isn’t!” takes the idea of making fun science fiction and goes for it at full tilt.  Take Benny, a bunch of squid-faced aliens, a few of Benny’s students and put them in a world controlled by panto.  Yup, panto… dames and all.  Now, I’ll make it clear that whereas it’s my favourite Benny it’s by no means perfect.  If you want the full blown experience and, I’m afraid to say, the full blown plot then you’ll need to track down a copy of the book on which it’s based.  The audio leaves quite a few questions unanswered, such as why Benny is the only person who doesn’t end up panto-ised and what happens to a lot of other characters but I guess if they put absolutely everything in then you’d have a drama that lasted for four or five CDs rather than just two.  With that out of my system I’ll return to the glowing praise that this first release definitely deserves.  Lisa Bowerman gets Benny spot on first time (doubly impressive given that a lot of the time the character’s fighting to actually stay as Benny and not turn male… oh just go listen to it!) and whereas a few of the other characters sound a little amateurish this sees the performance of a lifetime from the late and much missed Nicholas Courtney as Wolsey, Benny’s pet cat.  He purrs his way through the dick jokes and innuendos (with many of the entendres not quite making it to double).  It’s a delivery that can’t be faulted and, though not the role he’s famous for, it’s one that I really wish he could have repeated.  Most importantly, having re-listened, I have the strong desire to get the book out again and get the full blown Perfecton experience.

“Beyond the Sun”, unfortunately, is a much lower key release.  It’s based on the third novel in the solo-Benny range and it’s not a novel I really remember too much about.  I know I’ve heard this release a few times in the past but it’s never stuck in my mind enough to remember the details.  So the vast majority of the release was fairly fresh and new.  Mind you, there’s a reason I don’t remember the previous listenings too well.  It’s not the most engaging story.  Jason (another superb piece of casting) turns up, gives Benny an ancient artefact (supposedly part of a world destroying weapon) and then gets himself kidnapped.  Benny spends about an hour wandering around, then the “weapon” gets used and it turns out it’s not a weapon after all.  Then it ends.  I suppose I should re-read the novel to see what they cut out to get it on two CDs but there’s a part of me that didn’t actually get drawn into the release enough to care.  On the guest star front there’s Anneke Wills AND Sophie Aldred and the start of Big Finish’s long standing tradition of playing “distortion chicken”, ie how much distortion can they put on the aliens’ voices before they can’t be understood.  Thankfully, in this one, they mostly get it right. Emile, one of Benny’s students, isn’t quite played as well as it could be but the other bit parts aren’t too bad.  It’s just… a bit nothingy.  It’s background listening but it doesn’t drag you in.

The audio range then takes a huge jump, skipping seven novels and taking us to ancient Babylon.  “Walking to Babylon” is the start of the “time ring trilogy”.  Jason turns up, pinches an ancient artefact from Benny (this time it’s her wedding ring and the audio tends to skip over how she came to have it is it would have meant talking about the Doctor) and then gets kidnapped.  Benny goes after him, spends an hour or so wandering around ancient Babylon and then talks the bad guys out of blowing ancient Earth up.  As you can tell, there’s a certain plot overlap with the previous release but this time it’s ancient Babylon she’s wandering around rather than an alien planet.  Benny gets to sleep around a little, she gets to increase her feelings for Jason and there’s the introduction of “The People”.  Here things get very “book based”.  One of the things cut from the audio of “Oh No It Isn’t!” is a subplot involving God and The People, first introduced in the Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures and they are a regular part of the books that just feature Benny.  However, the back-story isn’t really fully detailed in the audio and there’s a lot of skirting around mentioning the Time Lords.  Keeping up the guest star trend is Elizabeth Sladen and she does lift the scenes she’s in above the rather bland level of the rest.  The story ends on a cliff-hanger as their escape from Babylon doesn’t quite go to plan and we head towards a rather difficult story to fit into any kind of continuity…

It’s at this point I should point out that I can be a little picky on the continuity front.  I do like things to fit together, must be the scientist in me.  I can happily accept the previous three releases as simple cut down re-tellings of the novels but “Birthright” goes back a long way in the New Adventures range and into the time of the Doctor… only the Doctor doesn’t appear.  This, in itself isn’t a problem.  The original novel was paired with one called “Iceberg”.  In modern terms, “Iceberg” was a companion-lite story and “Birthright” was a Doctor-lite one.  So far no concerns.  However, “Birthright” (the original novel) had Benny and Ace as the companions and, of course, they couldn’t use Ace in the audios.  So “Birthright” sees Jason taking on the Ace role, Benny being Benny and Colin Baker having the Russian accent from varying parts of Russia.  Which means that Benny has now experienced this adventure twice but with different friends?  Jason is trapped on a future earth (no TARDIS shell either) and Benny’s in the 1900s.  Once she’s arrived she wanders around a little and then talks a lot to the aliens, persuades them not to take over and then tries to leave.  Listened to in quick succession, the first Benny season does get a little repetitive at this stage.  However, the acting’s of a better quality and things are a little more fun.  It’s very easy to visualise what’s going on and, as it’s a civilization much closer to our own, I found it much easier to get attached to the characters.  It also helps that there’s a lot of continuity linking the two stories together and there’s a lot of throwing forward to the next one.  It’s tempting to try and find time to re-read the original novel, but not as tempting as it is to get the paper version of the next one.

“Just War”.  Don’t listen if you’re feeling in any way depressed.  Do listen if you want a master class in nasty Nazis, serious emotional blows and characters on both sides of the war being forced to question everything that they believe in.  It’s sublime, Lisa Bowerman gives a stunning performance, Stephen Fewell is never better as Jason and there’s not a single dull moment, not a wasted line of dialogue and everything comes together in a way that puts even more recent releases to shame.  It’s the end of the trilogy and a major step in the Jason/Benny relationship.  No big name guests in this, but there’s a pre-big name appearance from Maggie Stables, later to play Evelyn in the Doctor Who range and she steals every scene she’s in. It’s my second favourite ever Benny and only fails to beat “Oh No It Isn’t!” because it doesn’t have the humour and, well, I want my science fiction to be fun.

This brings us to “Dragon’s Wrath”.  I like my science fiction to be fun, not a horrendous cut down mess of a story.  It’s the first single CD release and tries to compress an entire novel into little over 70 minutes.  This means that Lisa Bowerman is forced to do large amounts of narration to deal with large chunks of plot that aren’t recorded, there are some very bad edits between scenes (and, seemingly, between lines in some cases) and there are a few particularly awful sounding performances (I couldn’t possibly name names, though it’s not Benny and surprisingly it’s not Richard Franklin either).  As a final release in the season it’s something of a let down.  No, it’s a big let down because it’s also the first appearance of the new Benny theme “music”.  I don’t think there are suitable/repeatable words to describe how dire it is, and it’s going to be around for a while as yet.

As first seasons go it’s actually not bad.  One duff release, a handful of below par performances and a good way to experience some of the Virgin Novels which, these days, aren’t too easy to get hold of.  What would have been great if season two could then revisit a few more of these, maybe a relaxed Jason and Benny starring in “The Also People” or a trip to the Land of Fiction in “Conundrum”… instead Benny is about to go completely original.  No remakes but there’ll be quite a few familiar monsters.  After a subscriber freebie….

The Impossible Countdown - The Lodger

Look, I've been ill.  Very ill.  And busy, something about working... anyway, ummmm, season 6 ends in a few hours so it's about time I try to finish season five.  I've got three lousy episodes ahead but first "The Lodger"

The Lodger.  A great comic strip but, unexpectedly, an even better episode!  I really wasn’t looking forward to this one when it was broadcast.  Swapping Tennant for Smith???  (Well, it’s not like they hadn’t done that already in a load of the early season five episodes)?  Swapping Mickey for James Corden?  Give me a break.

I forgot that Gareth Roberts really should be trusted more.

It’s one of Smith’s best performances of the season and, more importantly, it’s a very solid Doctor Who story.  It would work with pretty much any Doctor, the 7^th Doctor being mysterious but friendly, the 4^th Doctor coming in and just dominating things. “The Lodger” is a return to the proper days of Doctor Who with modern elements thrown in without them seeming too obvious.  Well, maybe a couple of scenes.  The headbutting, as glorious as it is with the flashback clips, is too over the top.  Far, far too over the top.  Ah well, at least it wasn’t kissing J

The design of the ship is stunning, someone’s given a serious amount of thought to how a TARDISthatisn’taTARDIS might look. There are roundels and a console like thing in the middle with the supports from the McGann movie.  There’s a creepy old man/young girl in homage to a Sapphire and Steel type atmosphere, there’s a Doctorsneakingoff moment that doesn’t work for the Doctor and a surprisingly low key use of time travel that seems to suit the low key nature of the episode (shame that a certain person will end up blowing it in a few episode’s time).  And there’s an ending to the plot that doesn’t quite work.  Why would there seemingly be a random one storey house in the middle of a long line of terraced houses?  The whole look of those final shots doesn’t do it for me.  It looks too obviously photoshopped as a bungalow.  Oh well…

“The Lodger” is one of the redeeming features of season 5. I’m very happy to have seen it… Shame it’s about to not just fall back down to the level of the previous episodes but plummet to new depths of incompetent writing…