The Eighth of March

Emancipation written by Lisa McMullin: Let me say first off all that I think this box set is a marvellous idea. To celebrate the women of Doctor Who in both fictional and a creative terms is a wonderful idea (although I still think a lack of Jacqueline Rayner and Lisa Bowerman in the writing and directing is a baffling omission) and the cover promises that is going to be a rousing set with the likes of Leela, River, Kate Stewart, Ace and Benny at the helm of these stories. Nurturing female talent is something that Big Finish has been criticised for in the past because the opening years of the company were very much a Boys club but fortunately the tide has turned and we are at a point now where with pretty much every set that the company brings out that there is a female voice in there somewhere. So far, so good. But you know when I have to start with a caveat like that that something has gone horribly wrong with the set itself. The Eighth of March, celebrating National Women's Day, is probably the least impressive release I have heard in some time and whilst there are some moments of fun to be had the overall experience is one I would not care to repeat. Emancipation has some energy and wit about it but this pairing of River Song and Leela is a little jarring. I'm fast coming to the conclusion that River brings the worst out in everybody. Posing as the Doctor (of course), she attends the Galactic Heritage Conference and prevents a Royal kidnapping with Leela at her side. They dance around each other, initially suspicious, but ultimately coming to see each others strengths in a dashabout timey wimey adventure that genuinely feels as though it has leapt from Steven Moffat's Doctor Who. Maybe that is why I wasn't so keen. There is a smugness and overconfidence to this. It behaves as though it is City of Death. Really it is more The Android Invasion. There are funny lines, and Kingston and Jameson acquit themselves well, but like so much of the River set it feels like bringing in classic elements of the show to get somebody to listen to River. Disposable fun: 6/10

The Big Blue Book by Lizzie Hopley: Or when everything that could go wrong with an audio adventure does go wrong. I'm not sure where to start with the bad. The one thing you should never do with your audio script is to give Sophie Aldred protracted scenes of dialogue talking to herself. I have found her to be a notoriously unreliable performer and this explains why. She's shouting her head off, awkward, unnaturalistic and has no idea of how to pace the dialogue so the audience feels as though they are solving the mystery with her. Why, when you have other characters (and better characters like Bernice), you would have your protagonist talking to herself for over ten minutes baffles me. Lisa Bowerman is conspicuous by her absence (was she originally supposed to be in this more?) and her time is eaten up by a pair of alien characters so annoying, so ill characterised and so badly performed that is difficult to see how such characters could come to be. Surely somebody would have told the actors to tone it down a bit? They screech and hiss their way through the terrible dialogue with baby voices in a really unpleasant way. Next up is the sound design and music, which are probably the worst I have heard in a while. The very least you can expect from Big Finish is a polished production but this feels like it has come out of the early days of the company with ugly, unpleasant music and sound effects so loud and discordant that I was constantly taken out of the story trying to figure out what was going on. At one point there is some very loud ticking - a clock or a bomb? Beats me. Nigel Fairs recently bombed a couple of the Vienna releases and is similarly ineffective here. Lastly, the script. Hopely is a proven talent elsewhere so goodness what went wrong here. The story confines itself to a library and a spaceship where Ace tries to figure out the mystery of what has happened to Bernice. The trouble is it is all done through a long series of questions, confrontations and exposition that never once sounds like words that people would actually say aloud. There's a good idea buried inside this story somewhere (people being turned into books) but it is thrown away because it is never explored imaginatively. Just lots of shouty scenes of people threatening each other. This was so bad that I was longing for it to be over. I cannot believe that anybody signed off this story for release. Let alone for a celebratory release like this. The rarest of things, an audio entirely without merit: 0/10  

Inside Every Warrior by Gemma Langford: Much better, but far from perfect. As a backdoor pilot for The Paternoster Gang I thought this was a really effective little piece. I've never been too enamoured with this set up - mostly because they are a bit of a one joke lash up and the joke was flogged to death over and over again on the TV series. Vastra and Jenny are a crime fighting couple with their comedy Sontaran stooge at their side. I thought they were most effective in The Crimson Horror where the show forgets for 20 minutes that it is Doctor Who at all and instead pretends it is a macabre horror series about this trio. Kudos to Langford then, who took this set up and dragged some emotion out of it. By the end of the story I felt that Vastra and Jenny were genuinely in love (rather than a political point, which is how the series often portrayed them) and just why they keep Strax around. On a character level, this really worked. The story, however, lacked any interest. Plenty of running around and kidnappings, an annoying turn from Nigel Fairs (not a strong set for him), and a lack of any serious engagement. At least there was the Victorian London setting that the sound designer could home in on to make this an atmospheric experience and the music, while distracting (it was really trying to push the jolly adventure tone) was a million times more enjoy able the previous story. It whetted my appetite for the Paternoster set, which I never foresaw: 5/10

Narcissus: The best of this set belongs to the UNIT team and given my allergic reaction to the only UNIT set that I have heard so far, that was unexpected. This script is everything that Extinction wasn't: focussed, engaging and well paced. It's lovely to hear Jackie McGee back for more fun and her part in the investigation of the dating agency revealed new colours to her character. I'm not sure how far into the UNIT series this is but Jemma Redgrave seems much more at home playing Kate Stewart on audio and Ingrid Oliver (always fantastic) gets a chance to play both Osgood and her Zygon double in some fascinating scenes about identity and how that can get skewered when there are two of you about. The plot rattles along with some nice surprises and whilst the resolution is nothing revelatory, the whole piece feels like a confident audio drama being created by a company that is a well oiled machine. Unlike the rest of this set. I'm pleased we ended on a strong note: 7/10