Occasionally, by accident or design, I read two or more books with a common theme and combine them into a single livejournal entry (indeed, checking back I see I've done that four times this month). And usually I combine my Big Finish reviews into multiple posts, as an act of mercy to the vast majority of readers who aren't interested. But this time, my reading and listening schedules happened to throw up a Who novel and a Who audio play with an identical central theme, though very different in the execution of that shared theme.

The Council of Nicæa is a relatively short audio play in the Big Finish range, by Caroline Symcox (who I last saw at MeCon). It brings the Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor, his TV companion Peri Brown and new audio companion Erimem to the year 325 and the theological disputes over the nature of God at the eponymous Council. Supporting characters from history are the Emperor Constantine, his wife Fausta, and the competing theologians Athanasius and Arius.

The Witch Hunters, by Steve Lyons, is an early one of the BBC's Past Doctor Adventures, set pretty firmly in TV chronology between The Sensorites and The Reign of Terror, bringing the First Doctor with companions Ian, Susan and Barbara to the village of Salem in Massachusetts in 1692, just in time for the infamous witch trials.

Both are stories in which there is no sfnal element in the historical context apart from the Doctor and his companions, and thus are very much rooted in the early traditions of the show. Both stories are a kind of response in Who terms to other writers - Symcox reacting against J. N. O. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines, Lyons more favourably to Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Both of them feature a historical context where, essentially, the bad guys are the mainstream authority Christians and the listener/reader is invited to sympathise with the underdog (Arius and his followers/the accused "witches"). In both cases, the youngest of the Tardis crew (Erimem/Susan) is instrumental in trying to change history in the favour of the underdogs, in both cases (and this is hardly a spoiler) unsuccessfully.

Symcox takes more liberties with the setting (Arius is portrayed as a young man and Athanasius as somewhat older; in fact the reverse was the case), as she is writing a more standard Doctor Who story and also has less time to do it in (less than 100 minutes, compared to Lyons' 282 pages). As often with Who, the Doctor gains the confidence of the authorities rather implausibly rapidly, which then of course accelerates the amount of trouble he and his friends get into. The two key elements of the story are the didactic part, informing the average listener who is (safely) assumed to know very little of the Council of Nicæa, and the character development of Erimem, who sides with Arius partly out of national solidarity (Arius was from Alexandria, Erimem is an ancient Egyptian pricess) but more out of a sense of fair play. She pleads that because 325 is her future, she should not be accused of trying to change the past. It all worked rather well for me, certainly much better than The Church and the Crown, an earlier audio with a similar concept except that the Doctor intervenes to force history into our timeline.

Lyons makes the reader work harder; he has more characters to follow (not just four in the Tardis crew instead of three, but a large chunk of the population of Salem) and more background knowledge is assumed. He is also sticking closer to the historical sequence of events, though The Crucible is explicitly referenced, with the Doctor and crew taking in the first performance in Bristol in 1954, and the Doctor then returning with Rebecca Nurse to take it in again. Actually Lyons handles the possibility of changing history a bit less convincingly than Symcox, with even the Doctor rather un-Doctorishly seduced by the possibility of intervening to save lives. He also requires the Tardis to operate rather more accurately than we saw at this stage of the show's history. Balanced against this, there are a lot of pleasing references to the first few television stories. The narrative has its own drama, which carries the book in the end, but the Tardis crew rather end up with the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Anyway, I found it interesting to compare and contrast between the two approaches - same basic idea, but different format and different details.

( The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy )
( The Green-Eyed Monsters )
( The Dance Of The Dead )
( The Mirror Effect )

In summary: The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy and The Dance Of The Dead excellent, The Mirror Effect OK, and The Green-Eyed Monsters less impressive. Also of course The Plague Herds of Excelis is set in the middle of this sequence.

( The Game: Five and Nyssa bring peace to a vicious planet, with William Russell )

( Dreamtime: Seven, Ace and Hex find Ayers' Rock/Uluru in space )

( Catch-1782: Six and Mel make some genealogical discoveries )

In summary, three unexceptional but decent plays.

So, the last of the Gallifrey audios with Louise Jameson as Leela, Lalla Ward as Romana, John Leeson as K9 and Mary Tamm as Romana's evil twin.

The first two of these five, Fractures and Warfare finish off the Pandora arc, with Romana and Leela successfully fighting back from the catacombs of Gallifrey. The final three, Appropriation, Mindbomb and Panacea all deal with the palace politics of deciding who runs the place once the internal conflict is over, and ends on an undecided note, Leela and Romana preparing to leave a devastated planet. The first two really do follow on very closely from season 2, so much so that I think the entire sequence of fifteen plays probably works better as five blocks of three rather than three blocks of five. Alan Barnes, as so often, excels in the final play which is the best of a generally decent run.

Three more Big Finish audios, the last one slightly out of sequence:

( Her Final Flight: Sixth Doctor meets Peri many years on - or does he? )

( The Juggernauts: Sixth Doctor and Mel meet Davros and the Daleks )

( Three's a Crowd: Fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem face angst and agoraphobia )

In summary, three good 'uns.
------------------

Having mostly enjoyed the first set of these, I can say that the second set is of the same order of quality.

( Mother Russia: Steven tells a story of the First Doctor in Napoleonic times )

( Helicon Prime: Jamie and the Second Doctor on holiday, solve a mystery )

( Old Soldiers: Brigadier recounts a German adventure with the Third Doctor )

( The Catalyst: Leela and the Fourth Doctor in Edwardian times )

So, try the first of these, and if you like it, experiment with the rest; good performances from the key actors, not so sure about the story in some cases.

I have rather run out of enthusiasm for the Eighth Doctor stories, which seemed to me to start very well and then go into a bit of a drag. These four, from late 2004, were the last "new season" presentation before the TV series was revived; I look forward to finding out if a change of format helped.

The other over-riding problem I have had with the Divergent Universe story line is that, if the entire setting is a put-up job by powerful alien scientists, and if our protagonists are in the habit of waking up to find that it was all a dream, it becomes quite difficult to care about what is happening.

( Faith Stealer )

( The Last )

( Caerdroia )

( The Next Life )

I wasn't overwhelmed by the first series of Sarah Jane Smith audios, but the second run is brilliant. Clearly Big Finish have rather hit their stride with the various spinoff series, I Davros also being a pretty unqualified success. And as with I Davros, I reckon the Sarah Jane plays would be fairly accessible to a non-fan, perhaps even more so; the setting is contemporary, and the only heavily sfnal element is in fact Sarah's own personal history (apart from the ambiguous ending). They form a single story arc, and all of them are by David Bishop, whose novel Who Killed Kennedy I enjoyed last year, and whose Test of Nerve, from the first run of SJS audios, turned out to be rather prophetic in its tale of terrorist attack on the London Underground.

( Buried Secrets )

( Snow Blind )

( Fatal Consequences )

( Dreamland )

One of the triumphs of the stories is the way in which families turn out to be important, more important than gangs of conspirators. We have Will Sullivan (played by Tom Chadbon = Duggan in City of Death) and his vanished but adored brother Harry, and the mother and daughter team of protesters, Maude and Emily, in the third story; and the revelation about Josh in the last story as well. And of course we listeners know that there is another family relationship there as Natalie is played by Elizabeth Sladen's daughter Sadie Miller.

Finally, it is a bit surprising that the same mistake was made three times of giving Sarah a Harry Sullivan-lite gormless male sidekick - Brendan in K9 and Company, Jeremy Fitzoliver in the two Third Doctor audios, and Josh in the first series of Big Finish's Sarah Jane adventures. Turning Josh into a deeper and more rounded character here was one of Bishop's best moves. Removing the twittish male side-kick altogether for the new TV series was an even better move.

As sometimes happens, I'm catching up with my Big Finish audio listening. I got through the second series of Bernice Summerfield audios, none of which reached the heights of the first series.

( The Secret of Cassandra )
( The Stone's Lament )
( The Extinction Event )
( The Skymines of Karthos )

So, if you are getting any of these, make it The Stone's Lament.

This is just a brilliant sequence of audio plays - apparently now available with the set of BBC Davros DVDs, which does make that sound like an even more attractive purchase, and comes close to conferring the stamp of accepted canonicity on the stories. Davros is, of course, perhaps the only character for whom you could develop a detailed back-story like this; the Master is too closely linked with the Gallifrey mythology, and there are not really any other villains of serious depth (some might come close - I have a high regard for Mavic Chen, myself.) This could have turned into the most awful fanwank, but in fact we have a tight, taut set of plays depicting the rise of Davros through the ranks of the Kaled leadership on Skaro against the background of the "Forever War" against the Thals. Terry Molloy reprises the title role (apart from most of the first play), and in the last play we get Peter Miles as Nyder.

( Innocence )

( Purity )

( Corruption )

( Guilt )

In summary, a brilliant set of four plays, which I suspect would stand on their own as dramas even for a non-Who fan.

Actually I've listened to five since my last big write-up but already did The Harvest here.

( The Axis of Insanity: Five, Peri and Erimem in interdimensional confusion )

( Arrangements for War: Six and Evelyn and a Romeo-and-Juliet situation )

( The Roof of the World: Five, Peri and Erimem play cricket in Tibet )

( Medicinal Purposes: Six and Evelyn go body-snatching )

I'm coming to realise that the Big Finish audios are a bit hit and miss; but then, so was the classic series, and so is the new version too. Sturgeon's Law, I suppose.

Big Finish started with these six stories back in 1998, featuring Bernice Summerfield, a companion invented by Paul Cornell in 1992 for the Virgin series of New Adventures with the Seventh Doctor. It's a much stronger start to the series than their early Doctor Who stories, possibly because they were adapting novels that had already been published, though I think that can't be the whole story. I had only read one of the books, Kate Orman's Walking to Babylon, so most of this was new to me. All good stuff, apart from the last one.

( Oh, No It Isn't! )
( Beyond the Sun )
( Walking to Babylon )
( Birthright )
( Just War )
( Dragon's Wrath )

Anyway, I'll listen to more of these.

Another catch-up post for Big Finish adventures 51-55, of which the first features the Sixth Doctor and Iris Wildthyme, and the others are Eighth Doctor and Charlie in the alternate universe which they were banished to at the end of Zagreus, with new companion C'rizz (pronounced "Kerres") joining for the last three.

( The Wormery )
( Scherzo )
( The Creed of the Kromon )
( The Natural History of Fear )
( The Twilight Kingdom )

I'm about four DW review posts behind at the moment, so bear with me while I clear the backlog. It's not really accurate to think of these five plays as a series in themselves; they follow pretty much straight on from the first series of four uniting Louise Jameson as Leela and Lalla Ward as Romana, the latter now president of the Time Lords, and the end is pretty unresolved. I liked the first two of these most, mainly for fannish reasons, but they were all decent enough.

( Gallifrey 2.1: Lies - Mary Tamm returns as the ghost of Romana I! )
( Gallifrey 2.2: Spirit - Leela and Romana on holiday together )
( Gallifrey 2.3-5: Pandora, Insurgency, Imperiatrix )

The four Excelis plays were apparently run as a parallel track to the first Eighth Doctor audios from Big Finish. They link the established Big Finish central characters - the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors, and Bernice Summerfield - with (in the first three) the marvellous Anthony Stewart Head (Giles from Buffy) and (in the first and last) Katy Manning as Iris Wyldthyme, a renegade Time Lord rather different in character from Jo Grant. They are fairly self-contained as stories; I thought the third, Excelis Decays, was the best.

( Excelis Dawns )

( Excelis Rising )

( Excelis Decays )

( The Plague Herds of Excelis )

I have been celebrating my purchase of the CD version of The Ark by listening to most of the 1965-66 season of Doctor Who on audio, all narrated by Peter Purves. I don't have audio versions of either the first story, Galaxy 4, or the last, The War Machines, but otherwise it adds up to 37 episodes of seven (or eight) stories. A child conceived just before Mission to the Unknown was broadcast would have been due shortly after the last episode of The Savages.

I think it's a brilliant run of stories. The First Doctor, having shed the original Tardis crew, settles down to being a strange cosmic wizard, with a slightly contemptuous and hobbyist attitude to technology and science, and a vigorous sense of ethics and morality. Peter Purves as Stephen plays straight man and action man, often tactlessly reminding the Doctor that he has no control over where the Tardis lands. There are no less than four female companions - Vicki (married off), Katarina (sucked into outer space), Sara Kingdom (the best of the four, who gets aged into dust at the end of The Daleks' Master Plan) and Dodo Chaplet (of whom I have written before). Nicholas Courtney makes his first Doctor Who appearance as Bret Vyon (and also ends up getting shot). And there are three particularly memorable villains: Mavic Chen, the Guardian of the Solar System who betrays humanity to the Daleks; the mysterious Celestial Toymaker; and, if only briefly, the Meddling Monk.

It's a tremendously varied set of stories too: three (or four) more or less straight sf, three historicals (two played mainly for laughs, the third a tragic drama) and the experimental format of The Celestial Toymaker. And having said that the Doctor's character has settled down, in fact we have a lot of experimentation with his own role: the first episode in this run, Mission to the Unknown, does not feature the Doctor or his companions at all; in the last of the stories, he contaminates the main villain with his life essence to turn him into a reflection of his own character; in between, he spends several episodes invisible (we also encounter not one but two races of invisible aliens), and, most notoriously, he breaks the fourth wall to wish the audience at home a merry Christmas. (A more minor point of formatting: The Savages was the first story not to have individual titles for each episode.)

The sequence is surprisingly bleak in places. The portrayal of future human society is not very positive - Mavic Chen is a combination of Tito and Franco, perhaps, with no democratic underpinnings, while the humans of The Ark survive by enslaving the Monoids (who then turn on them) and Jano and his colleagues are supporting their utopia by vampirically leeching off their own kind. Two female companions die horribly. All three historical stories end in mass killings (the sack of Troy, the eponymous St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and the shootout at the OK Corral). But The Myth Makers and The Gunfighters, and the Christmas and New Year episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan, are basically comic, and though it's not to everyone's tastes I find it works for me. (The twentieth century appears basically as comic relief in The Daleks' Master Plan, and briefly at the end of The Massacre to introduce Dodo; the first real contemporary story was The War Machines.)

With audio, the listener is left to imagine the visuals, and given the way in which special effects technology has moved on in the last 40 years this is probably just as well (perhaps most true of The Celestial Toymaker, whose one surviving episode is visually rather dull). The various Daleks, other aliens and humans of The Daleks' Master Plan sound particularly memorable. That is also the story with the best sound effects, with various jungly noises for the planet Kembel, and the sinister throb of the Time Destructor. But the two final stories of the sequence are musically quite remarkable: the narrative of The Gunfighters is framed in a ballad performed by an off-screen narrator (not everyone likes this but it is one of my guilty pleasures), and Raymond Jones' electronic incidental music for The Savages is innovative and memorable.

Anyway, I've written each of these up separately before, but it was interesting to put them all together and listen in the sequence first intended (especially to separate Mission to the Unknown from The Daleks' Master Plan by the four episodes of The Myth Makers). It is surely the most diverse season the show has ever had, in terms of setting and tone. Perhaps none of the stories is individually as strong as the greatest of the Tom Baker/Philip Hinchcliffe/Robert Holmes years, but taken as a whole it's one of the best sequences of classic Who.

Two Doctor Who audios this week - yes, the month that Big Finish are publishing the 100th in their series of plays, I have got around to #50, Zagreus, a three-CD extravaganza with four Doctors (Davison, C Baker, McCoy and McGann); and I also listened to Slipback, the first proper Doctor Who audio play (I shall justify this controversial claim below), broadcast by the BBC in 1985.

Zagreus is surely the best (so far) of the various anniversary offerings. The Three Doctors is rather poor, The Five Doctors is at least an honest effort, and the less said about the 30th anniversary the better. But here we have the "current" Eighth Doctor/Charley pairing (the sparkling Paul McGann/India Fisher combination) meeting a whole host of characters, more or less real, played by former cast members of the televised series. I didn't recognise all the voices on first listening, partly because I wasn't expecting so many, but I may even try listening again with a crib sheet in front of me; as well as Lalla Ward and Louise Jameson reprising Romana II and Leela, with splendid Time Lady/savage bitchiness setting up the scenario for the Gallifrey spinoffs (plus John Leeson as K-9), we have the voices of Polly, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, Nyssa, Turlough, Peri, Erimem, Evelyn Smythe, Mel, Ace, Benny, and the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors all playing other parts, and also Don Warrington as Rassilon, three years before he became President of Britain. Oh, and Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, even though he had died seven years earlier. I'm not wild about the main plot strand, though it develops quite well from the previous Eighth Doctor story, Neverland, but the device of exploring the Doctor's past through distorted reflections in his subconscious works - it could have been really gruesome and self-indulgent, but in fact you can't wait to find out what happens next. I am not surprised to find that Alan Barnes, who is my favourite of the Big Finish writers, gets an authoring credit here.

Slipback was produced in the 18-month hiatus between Colin Baker's two full seasons, a six-part radio series starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the Sixth Doctor and Peri. It's an odd contrast to the more recent Big Finish audios featuring Baker and/or Bryant. The first difference to strike you is that Baker really doesn't much reflect the egotistical brash persona of the Sixth Doctor as seen on TV and heard in the videos. (Bryant is unmistakeably Peri though.) The second difference is that the six episodes only last ten minutes each, which really is the wrong length. If this had been successful, we might have seen a seamless transitioning of Doctor Who to audio instead of television, more than a decade before Big Finish got into it. But it wasn't. The problem is that the author was Eric Saward, trying to channel Douglas Adams and not doing it very well. One of the characters is a computer with a squeaky accent, combining Eddie and Trillian from the Hitch-Hiker's Guide. Valentine Dyall is wasted as an insane spaceship captain who enjoys his baths. The whole thing fails to gel.

None the less, this is the first "proper" Doctor Who audio play. The 1976 Fourth Doctor audios don't count: in Doctor Who and the Pescatons, most of the narrative is carried by the Fourth Doctor telling the story, with occasional voicing from Sarah Jane Smith and the villain, and in any case it isn't a "real" BBC production. Exploration Earth is too didactic to count as proper drama. The two Third Doctor audio stories were recorded later. So Slipback is in a lot of ways the fons et origo for  Big Finish's subsequent triumphs.

Two rather routine stories, followed by four very experimental ones and three stories revisiting old Who themes.

Nekromanteia: listened to it some time ago. Five, Peri and Erimem, rather incoherent plot with witches and planetary invasion, nice touch with the cat at the end.

The Dark Flame: felt this worked a bit better. Seven, Ace and Benny and a rather complex tale of identities and possession - seemed to borrow bits from Image of the Fendahl and The Hand of Fear, but no harm in that.

Doctor Who and the Pirates: billed as the Six and Evelyn musical story, though in fact the Gilbert and Sullivan songs are restricted to the third episode of the four. Bill Oddie as the pirate captain! But a very successful leavening of the comic overtones with a serious and tragic foundation.

Creatures of Beauty: Another experiment in format, with the plot fragmented non-sequentially across the four episodes, so that the crucial contribution of Five and Nyssa to the very beginning of the story only really becomes clear at the end. Very well done.

Project: Lazarus is a story in two parts, the first of which is (another) tragic tale with Six and Evelyn, and the second featuring Seven and Six together - or is it really Six? Rather on the horrific side for my taste, but well done.

Flip-Flop: Like Creatures of Beauty, requires some intellectual work from the listener. The two discs are alternate versions of the same planet's history, in each case changed into the other by the intervention of the Doctor and Mel. Really very well done.

Omega: Five on his own, dealing with Omega who is attempting to re-manifest in this universe. Lots of creative playing with the listener's head, culminating in a brilliant moment at the end of episode three. And an Irish time lord - Professor Ertikus, played by Patrick Duggan. Really liked it despite my lack of familiarity with Arc of Infinity. Despite the serious theme I thought it borrowed more than a few elements from Douglas Adams.

Davros: Alas, despite resurrecting Terry Molloy to play Davros, ex-Gulliver/Time Lord/Thal Bernard Horsfall to play the chief human villain, and the fantastic Wendy Padbury to play his wife, I felt the brilliant cast was let down by the plot, which has an episode of silly office bickering between the Sixth Doctor and Davros and then the predictable mayhem and slaughter.

Master: Again, alas, decent performances by all, rather let down by the plot which is an extended piece of the type of fan-fic we have all read so much of since June. (Except this is Seven/Beevers Master rather than Ten/Simm Master.)

In summary, the middle five of these are all excellent; not so sure about the two on either side, though Davros does have nostalgia value.

A series of five (well, four and a half) audios from Big Finish, featuring the now retired General Sir Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and his successors at the head of the British branch of UNIT, portraying them as a sort of military X-Files, but locked in combat for Britain's security with the Internal Counter Intelligence Service (ICIS). UNIT's new commander, Ross Brimmacombe-Wood, is played by none other than David Tennant. I enjoyed them very much.

( discussion with spoilers )

So, in summary, these are all good fun; if you want to listen to just one to sample, make it #3, The Longest Night.

One side issue: I was comprehensively spoiled for important plot twists by reading the Wikipedia entry for UNIT, and while normally I don't especially mind, in this case it really did impair my enjoyment of the plays. Hoping to preserve others from being caught the same way, I deleted the key sentences from the WikiPedia page; they were immediately restored by another editor citing WP:SPOIL: "It is almost never acceptable to delete information from an article because it constitutes a spoiler." WTF?

I discovered that I had been missing out on the Doctor Who Monthly CDs issued as companion pieces for the Big Finish sequence of audio plays - I had heard one of them, The Maltese Penguin, but in the wrong place - so have caught up with the first three to take me to roughly the right place in internal continuity.

( The Ratings War )

( No Place Like Home )

( Living Legend )

Am revisiting some Old Who soundtracks for the rest of this week's listening.

( The Rapture: Seventh Doctor, Ace and Tony Blackburn on Ibiza )
( The Sandman: Sixth Doctor and Evelyn and some aliens )
( The Church and the Crown: Fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem in the France of the Three Musketeers )
( Bang-Bang-A-Boom! Seventh Doctor and Mel in a far-future version of the Eurovision Song Contest )
( Jubilee: Sixth Doctor, Evelyn and the Daleks, in a story which was later revised for television )

So, in summary, all good stuff, with The Rapture the best and The Sandman the least impressive.

The first ever commercially produced Doctor Who audio was the 1976 Argo Records production, Doctor Who and the Pescatons, starring Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen as the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith. To be honest, it is not fantastic. The plot is ripped off by writer Victor Pemberton from his Second Doctor series Fury from the Deep; there are only three actors (someone playing the villainous leader of the alien Pescatons), and so Baker switches from dialogue to linking narration rather jerkily; too much plot happens off-stage, as it were; and the solution, as he kills off the aliens and destroys their planet, is rather un-Doctor-ish. One for completists like me, but most of you can skip it.

Even more so the much shorter Exploration Earth, also from 1976, an educational radio programme which just has the Doctor and Sarah travelling through time and observing the gradual geological development of the planet Earth, with a chrome alien attempting to disrupt things, who is despatched rather casually at the end.

I have slipped behind in noting these, partly due to my long trip ending after 24 hours rather than six days last week. So this will be a fairly short set of reviews.

( Five Sarah Jane Smith Plays... )

( ...five with Five, Six and Seven... )

( ...and three of Eight. )

Anyway, looking forward to the next ones now; though I may take a break from the sequence for some more spinoff plays first.

Two 1990s audio plays here, both by long-time BBC producer Barry Letts, both starring Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor (18 years after he had stopped playing the TV role) with Elisabeth Sladen and as Sarah Jane Smith and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier.

( The Paradise of Death )

( The Ghosts of N-Space )

Anyway, good to hear the voice of Pertwee in his last performances in the role, and the other two leads seem to be having fun too - the Brigadier actually gets to lead a military operation in both stories. Shame about Jeremy.

My return to the gym this week after almost a month's absence, combined with some solitary lunches and longer than expected train journeys, meant that I got through four more Who audios, one for each of the four participating Doctors. I liked the first of these least, and the last most.

( Minuet in Hell: Eight, Charley, Brigadier and a real muddle of a story )

( Loups-Garoux: Five, Turlough and werewolves in Brazil )

( Dust Breeding: Seven, Ace, and old friends )

( Bloodtide: Six, Evelyn, Charles Darwin and the Silurians )

So, skip the first of these but the other three are all worth getting.

Big Finish's series of audio plays featuring the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Doctor Whos have been a roaring success. Unfortunately they cannot do the same for the first four Doctors, with the actors who played 1-3 having shuffled off this mortal coil and #4, the glorious Tom Baker, being famously unwilling to reprise the role. So what they have done is to get four actors who played companions of the first four doctors tell the story of a "missing adventure", with one guest star in each case providing the voice of the chief villain. It's a grand idea, and I liked all of these, though each had small problems which one can overlook.

( Frostfire: Vicki, reminiscing in Carthage, tells the story of her meeting with Jane Austen and the Phoenix )

( Fear of the Daleks: Zoe relates her strange dreams )

( The Blue Tooth: Liz Shaw and the Cybermen )

( The Beautiful People: Romana and the health club )

But anyway, in all cases the fun outweighs the annoyances, and they are all worth adding to your library.

It's only a short week in Brussels, and I somehow didn't make it to the gym, but I got through another two Eighth Doctor audios on the commute, the second and third of the Big Finish series with Paul McGann and India Fisher playing his companion Charley Pollard.

( The Sword of Orion: boring Cyberman rubbish )

( The Stones of Venice: atmospheric and evocative )

I bought this CD of three radio plays related to Doctor Who when in Forbidden Planet in London last month. Two of the three are very good indeed, and I guess I can ignore the third.

( Regenerations: Doctor Who meets Northern Ireland politics - fantastic )

( Blue Veils and Golden Sands: interesting biographical portrayal of Delia Derbyshire )

( Dalek, I Love You: awful )

More Doctor Who audios - I know I said I was taking a break, but had problems finding and then ripping the CDs I actually wanted to listen to, so they will have to be later in the week. Two clunkers, one OK and one superb one this time.

( The Maltese Penguin: Sixth Doctor and Frobisher in a yawn a minute )

( The Holy Terror: Sixth Doctor and Frobisher again )

( Last of the Titans: Seventh Doctor on his own )

( Storm Warning: Eighth Doctor's triumphant return )