As previously mentioned, I enjoyed both the short-lived Doctor Who spinoff TV series Class and its associated novels; Big Finish have now done two series of audios based on the show, using all the lead actors, though not all at the same time. I’ve listened to the first and will report on the second in due course. Each consists of three stories.
Gifted by Roy Gill picks up the April/Ram relationship (as played by Sophie Hopkins and Fadi Elsayed) and tests it against a rather excellent villain played by Deirdre Mullins with a sidekick played by Rhys Isaac-Jones. There’s decently done nasty fairy tales and adolescent angst. It’s a good start.
Life Experience, by Jenny T. Colgan, has Ram (Fady Elsayed) again with Tanya (Vivian Oparah) and the biggest guest cast of the three plays, led by Lu Corfield as mad alien scientist Marta Vanderburgh. Ram and Tanya have been sent to a local laboratory as work experience; the mayor (a fantastic performance by Jasmine Stewart) turns up as well; it turns out that the lab is carrying our some very non-standard experiments and all hell breaks loose, almost literally. Great fun.
Tell Me You Love Me, by Scott Handcock, is one of those stories that works much better in audio than it could on screen. Charlie (Greg Austin) and Matteusz (Jordan Renzo) are enjoying a romantic moment after school when they are assailed by an alien that propagates on sound alone; they call in Miss Quill (Katherine Kelly) who as usual gets all the good lines and deals ruthlessly with the problem.
The slight disappointment for fans of the TV show is that none of the three bring the full cast together as a team. At the same time of course this allows the better performers to shine a bit more. Certainly the three plays are fully in the spirit of the show, but also I think would be fairly accessible to listeners who had not seen the original. One other disappointment is that in the behind-the-scenes interviews with the cast, the sound balancing is rather poor and some of the actors are pretty inaudible. Nonetheless, you can get them here.
My problem with the Monty Python article is the same as for when it was Johnny Rotten that people were slatting. It’s fine for the writer to sell out and do things for money, but not for the writer’s heroes. I’m stuck between stuff that and the horse it rode in on and telling the writer to grow up.