What’s it about: After travelling through time and space with the Doctor, Henry Gordon Jago and Professor Litefoot are back in London starting brand new lives. Jago has become a huge celebrity and Litefoot the quiet owner of a bookshop, but in all other respects it is business as usual. As they investigate a wealth of new cases – including a restaurant where the food eats the people, and a book with dangerous powers – a long game is playing out. A figure from their past is back, and this time he means to destroy them...
Theatrical Fellow: Where else would Henry find employment in
the sixties but in the entertainment industry? The idea of him hosting his own
television show fills me with delight…now he can be seen across the country
providing entertainment for the masses. Give him time and he’ll be bigger than
Bruce Forsyth, Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies! We’re a country that
likes in indulging in the entertainment of the past so a show capturing the
flavour of traditional vaudeville would probably go down a treat, even today
(get patenting the idea, Morris!).
Posh Professor: Litefoot creating his own little slice of
home in the sixties, running a bookshop that specialises in Victorian tomes, is
lovely. I envisioned it looking just like the dimensionally transcendental
library that opened the Jonny Morris penned eleventh Doctor strip The
Professor, The Queen and the Bookshop (but then I would do anything to remind
me of that one-off delight) but in reality it is probably a musty old bolthole
with heaps of books piled floor to ceiling for people to rummage through and
lose themselves in. In this setting Litefoot feels positively antediluvian but
at the same time he embraces the advances in medicine and technology. I love
how the characters make the best of a bad situation, not dwelling on the fact
that they might never get home (which is all Romana, Leela and the rest whinge
on about in Gallifrey) but posing the question once and then carving out a
niche for themselves in the sixties. They also ponder whether they should look
up their own contributions in the history books but decide (with the prompting
from Ellie) not to do so, because it might affect their decisions when they do
get home. Litefoot making Ellie promise to prevent them doing so (but not
having done that yet) is very Moffat-esque. When Litefoot says he feels quite
embarrassed for the half dressed dancing girls of the sixties he sounded just
like my other half when he sees barely attired girls walking around the town.
Like Litefoot, he is a man out of time too. Litefoot has some very succinct
points to make about romanticising the past and points out that the same things
that are unacceptable in the sixties (poverty for example) were just as bad
back then, probably worse.
Standout Performance: Perhaps it is a little too obvious to
continue lavishing praise on Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter. They’re
brilliant, but I wouldn’t expect anything us by the series’ frontrunners. Lisa
Bowerman provides a new interpretation of Ellie that I really enjoyed, older,
wiser and more confident in herself. But my plaudits go to Duncan Wibsey as
Sacker who has a voice so gorgeous listening to it is like slipping into a
just-too-hot bath loaded with exotic scents.
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘Nothing’s more irritating than someone
who knows what happens next and wont tell you!’
‘It’s positively pulsating!’ – the rudest example of
alliteration and it doesn’t come from Jago!
‘I say this is the most un-Victorian behaviour! I am not
amused!’
Great Ideas: Joyously the series opens with what appears to
be Henry back in his old stomping ground of the theatre when in fact it is the
recreation of one in a television studio, the series mocking it’s own
progenitor, Talons of Weng-Chiang that was in production just a decade later.
Cleverly season five takes advantage of Ellie’s transformation into a vampire
in earlier years to revel in her continued existence long beyond any mortal
human being and has her established in the sixties with her own life. Sacker
was a bit more problematic at first because I couldn’t recall how the character
departed the series (and was so enjoying myself with The Age of Revolution that
I didn’t want to go back and find out) but his presence is explained adequately
by the story’s end (it’s not our Sacker, but somebody late in his lineage who
looks very similar). The Age of Revolution takes a while to admire the scenery
before explaining away Jago & Litefoot’s appearance in the sixties which
was the smartest thing they could have done, it allows us to get into the
spirit of the time before finding out how our regulars fit in. Ellie mentions
that her friends told her about their excursion to the sixties which is a
strong indicator to those who don’t like this approach that our friends will
return to their own time and place before long. Ellie has seen everybody she
knows grow old and die while she just keeps on going. She’s cursed in exactly
the same way Captain Jack was, living through the entirety of the 20th
Century at exactly the same age. Without labouring the point there is some
intelligent dialogue that compares the two eras, taking in entertainment,
poverty, technology and methods of transport. A society of backwards thinkers
who want to take things back to the morality and manners of the Victorian age
is just the establishment for Jago & Litefoot to slip in unnoticed (my
husband would undoubtedly be a member, listening to their criticisms of modern
life is remarkably similar to his opinions…although he’s never had any
illusions that he would only want to live back then if he had money).
It’s like Robot’s Thinktank, just looking in the other direction. Talk of the
country is like spending a Sunday afternoon with my mum and nan (much to my
discomfiture). Beyond getting the two stars of the show to the sixties I really
enjoyed how Jonny Morris includes an element of his own story Voyage to Venus
in this tale, lending their adventures in space and time with the Doctor more
weight.
Audio Landscape: Applause, an excitable crowd, rain lashing,
door bell, taxi cab, dog barking, traffic, bullets bouncing, villagers fleeing,
a city in flames, water dripping, the hypnotising statue.
Musical Cues: The fanfare that opens the series shows that
this is one series that is embracing it’s changes with uplifting theatrical
flair. The new theme music courtesy of Jamie Robertson, which is a delicious mix of Avengers camp and James
Bond excitement, is an absolute joy to listen to. I rewound it twice. In fact
Howard Carter’s score embraces the new style of storytelling and absolutely
runs with it. It’s music I would love to be able to hear in isolation. The
Indian influences are especially gorgeous.
Standout Scene: Impossible to choose. It’s all rather
marvellous. I really liked the intelligent discussion of the shifts in
morality, manners and degradation between the Victorian age and that of the
sixties. How both sides of the argument are given equal credence.
Result: With Jago, Litefoot, Ellie and Sacker all
transferring from the old stomping ground of the Victorian age to the swinging
sixties, the range manages to find itself a blissful revolutionary home from
home for a season. The main difference between this and another series that I
have perhaps mentioned rather too much in this review that has in recent
undergone a similar shift in tone and style is that Jago & Litefoot takes
to its new setting like a duck to water and approaches the possibility of
telling new kinds of stories with a joi de vivre that is impossible to
resist. Jonathan Morris always writes something special for this range and
doesn’t just adapt to the new setting but embraces it whole-heartedly taking in
everything from sixties psychedelia (I detected traces of his awesome eleventh
Doctor strip Forever Dreaming) to Avengers spy drama and Austin
Powers style nostalgia. The Age of Revolution eases us into this new style
gently with the clever use of narration to re-introduce to Jago, Litefoot and
Ellie from the point of view of a character from this time period. Indeed the
way that Sacker discovers the diaries of his grandfather explaining his
involvement with the infernal investigators means that you could pick up this
series without ever having listened to what came before. It mines a very
different avenue of stories to Countermeasures despite taking place in the same
time period (although a crossover might be great fun). This opening installment
has a great deal of exposition to get out of the way so its not perhaps the
most effective standalone adventure (there’s plenty of intelligent detail but
the resolution is so pat its not really worth considering) but I’ll forgive it
that because it attacks its central premise (moving the series forwards in
time) with such gusto it is impossible not to get wrapped up in the atmosphere
of the piece. The atmosphere and tone has changed but the structure of the
stories (investigating imaginative ideas of the time) has remained exactly the same. The
same, but different. This is such a delightful departure from the norm
I’m in two minds as to whether I want to return to the Victorian era…but I have
three more adventures to get that out of my system. This series continues to be
the crowning glory of Big Finish’s oeuvre: 9/10
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