Audio Frequencies
Review by STEVE O’BRIEN
Reviewed this issue
• The Seventh Doctor: The New Adventures – Volume One (featuring the Seventh Doctor, Roz and Chris) RRP £23 (CD), £20 (download)
• UNIT: Revisitations RRP £23 (CD), £20 (download)
• The Early Adventures: Entanglement (featuring the First Doctor, Vicki and Steven) RRP £14.99 (CD), £10.99 (download)
Available from
bigfinish.com
The New Adventures? The name’s been taken, surely? Technically, this spanking new collection of Seventh Doctor stories should be called The NEW New Adventures, seeing as they’re freshly written tales set in the continuity of the fondly remembered Doctor Who novels published by Virgin in the 1990s.
Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej, the Seventh Doctor’s TARDIS chums for a chunk of that book series, first surfaced on audio in 2015 when Big Finish set about adapting some of the range’s chef d’oeuvres. Now they’re back in a new run of stories that you won’t have already read 20-odd years ago. Despite this collection’s nostalgianudging moniker, these are very much traditional, albeit super-chiselled Doctor Who stories, with nary a hint of the swaggeringly grown-up tone of Virgin’s no-kids-allowed book series. This first release bundles up four tales described by producer Scott Handcock as “punchy little stories”. Yet at an hour apiece, they’re still a fair bit fatter than most TV episodes. Having Andy Lane pen the first story here is a nice touch, seeing as he created the characters of Roz and Chris back in 1995. The Trial of a Time Machine takes the crew to Thrantas, a planet where the punishment meted out for a crime depends on the impact that crime has on society as a whole. But when the TARDIS collides with another time-ship, sending it hurtling into the future, it’s not the Doctor who ends up in the dock but the TARDIS itself. The Doctor’s Wife aside, there aren’t many stories where we get a sense of the TARDIS as a sentient thing (bar the odd engine grunt that usually makes it sound like a disgruntled collie) – and it’s hard to suppress a pang when hearing the old girl in such judicial danger. The thought of the TARDIS, if found guilty, being effectively lobotomised is quite upsetting.