I am enjoying working my way through the BBC Doctor Who audiobooks starting from a decade ago. This is a series of four loosely linked stories, two by one of my favourite Who writers (James Goss) and two by one of my least favourite (George Mann). The linking theme is a family called Winter who possess a card that summons the Doctor and the TARDIS, and is passed through the centuries. I may have missed something, but I didn’t think that the overarching theme was actually resolved, which subtracts from the narrative oomph. Also unfortunately the sequence is not related to Goss’ excellent Eleventh Doctor novel The Dead of Winter.
The Gods of Winter by James Goss, read by Claire Higgins (Ohila of Karn), starts with a little girl who has lost her cat and summons the Doctor to find it. We then gradually discover that there is more going on in the human space colony in conflict with the mysterious Golhearn. I don’t think it is a big spoiler to say that the second half of the story takes us several decades forward to a moment when the little girl is now one of her community’s leaders, in dire straits, and the Doctor exerts diplomatic skills to sort it all out. You can get The Gods of Winter here.
The House of Winter, by George Mann, read by David Schofield (Odin) surprised me in that I actually enjoyed it. Th premise is that the Doctor and Clara are stuck in a house with its creepy owner and two creepy servants, and a bunch of vampire moths. There is one classically awful Mann-ish bit of description: “His expression was serene, save for his eyes which were open and staring, peering up at her as if pleading for help” – so, not actually very serene at all. But apart from that it hung together very well. You can get The House of Winter here.
The Sins of Winter, by James Goss, read by Robin Soans (Luvic in The Keeper of Traken and the Chronolock guy in Face the Raven), is the best of these (and the fact that the linking between the four is weak means that you can get this without having to worry about the other three). Shadrak Winter, the High Cardinal of the Cult of the Prime Self, summons the TARDIS to his space cathedral which is infested by the sluglike Sinful, who love feasting on people’s past sins. The Doctor has plenty of these to go on, leaving Clara to save the day. It’s a theme that has been used before and since i Doctor Who, but executed very well here. I see that fan opinion is divided on this one, but I’m on the positive side. You can get The Sins of Winter here.
The Memory of Winter, by George Mann, read by Jemma Redgrave (who is the best reader of all of these) takes the Doctor and Clara to fifteenth-century France for an adventure with Joan of Arc. There is Time Lord knowledge turning up in the wrong place and giving poor Joan the impression of hearing voices. I thought the story was well enough done, but it doesn’t really tie into the historical events around Joan at all and doesn’t resolve the linking mystery of the series. You can get The Memory of Winter here.
I did not get very far with the longer categories in the month between the shortlist announcement on 1 March and tonight’s close of voting. I confess that I was guided by the principle of value for money – the better the ratio of pages to dollars (I get my ebooks from Amazon.com), the more likely I was to read it. The consequence was that I did not read anything like the full ballot in any of these categories.
I list them below in the order of the categories on the ballot paper, which is not the order in the voter booklet (for which many thanks).
I covered Best Audio Fiction and Best Artwork yesterday.
Best Collection
My top vote goes to Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha, a great imaginative collection of twelve mostly fantasy stories about uncertainty and weirdness. The title piece, which ends the book, is the most memorable, with the protagonist carrying around his father’s zombified skull in his backpack for occasional strategic consultations. The second paragraph of the third story (“The Mub”) is:
Somewhere between the black slopes and the longest stretch of the cratered plains, I came across a traveler who I thought might be leaving the city and headed for the nested forests. I greeted him from a distance, just as the road curved around a copse of crooked and dry-skinned pines, but he would not look at me. It was only when we came close to one another that he muttered, “Don’t,” as though throwing the word heavily at my feet, then kept on his way without offering anything else. I’d thought it unkind and almost said something in response.
I also really enjoyed Who Will You Save?, the collection of short stories by Gareth Powell. I enjoyed it more than I expected frankly – 400 pages is quite a lot for a short fiction collection, and many of the stories tie into his other writing, not all of which I am familiar with. But there is a pleasing rejection of formula, or at the vey least some new twists on old stories. Some themes come up several times (teenage love; Bristol) but
The second paragraph of the third story (“Waiting for God Knows”) is:
“It’s an outrage,” Fenrir grumbled over our common channel.
Blood in the Bricks, edited by Neil Williamson, is an anthology of short stories with urban settings heading towards the horror end of the spectrum. The second paragraph of the third story (“Hagstone”, by Tracy Fahey) is:
The yelling is louder. I sigh, fold over the page of the sports section, and get to my feet, grunting out a whoosh of air as I do. Outside, the stark new shapes of industrial units tower over me. The digger is in front of the old half-demolished factory; a rotten tooth in the slick industrial estate. A boy jumps off the digger and runs towards me. Even though the sun beats steadily down, I shiver suddenly; a quick spasm. Goose walking over my grave.
Some of these were very good, including “Hagstone”. But some editorial pruning could have made for a leaner healthier collection; there were too many stories where the protagonist ends up as a human sacrifice to the city’s demons, like The Wicker Man except indoors. You can get Blood in the Bricks here.
I’m afraid that I didn’t get around to the other three nominees, so I will look silly if one of them wins. They are:
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, ed. Andre M. Carrington
Black Friday, by Cheryl S. Nutty
Creative Futures: Beyond and Within, ed. Allen Stroud
(Update: the winner was Blood in the Bricks.)
Best Non-Fiction (Long)
To my surprise, I find that I am voting for Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts. The second paragraph of the third chapter is long, like most of them:
Two decades later English jurist Henry Sumner Maine, deeply influenced by Carlyle’s writing, published Ancient Law; Its Connection to the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861). His thesis is that society had shifted from human identity and being-in-the-world as defined by one’s status – one’s place in the social hierarchy, the great chain of being – to our social being and interactions as governed by contracts. In some ways, since contracts (unlike status) can be engaged voluntarily, Sumner sees this as an improvement. But there are losses too, and those losses are what Past and Present is about. Carlyle argues less like a lawyer and more like an artist, and he is certain that what has been lost is reverence, something no contract can bestow: ‘at public hustings, in private drawing-rooms, in church, in market, and wherever else have true reverence, and what indeed is inseparable therefrom, reverence the right man, all is well; have sham-reverence, and what also follows, greet with it the wrong man, then all is ill, and there is nothing’. The contrast Carlyle draws between industrialized irreverential contemporaneity and the vivid life of his imagined medieval world establishes precisely the contrast that the Tolkienian and Lewisian mode of fantasy would later valorize:
Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer’s Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell.¹
¹Carlyle, Past and Present, 2:1.
This was a really fun and informative read, taking the history of fantasy writing from the very beginning to almost the present day. I am very familiar with the historical structure of the genre, but it was very helpful to see it laid out in such a structured way. Roberts is effusive but also analytical of the writers he admires; he takes no prisoners with the others – on Robert Jordan, for instance:
Manifestly the stylistic inadequacies of these books, their vastness, derivate repetitiveness, do not discourage millions of fans from imaginatively playing in the imaginative theme parks they represent: a wish-fulfilment world more colourful than our own, furnishing an idealized nostalgic past that does not deprive us of present-day bourgeois creature-comforts, parlayed through honest-to-goodness melodramatic emotional intensity.
Often I found myself starting his coverage of one of the series or authors that I have not read thinking “Oh, must try that sometime” and then at the end of Roberts’ analysis thinking “Mmm, maybe not”. There are some annoying typos, and there is almost no coverage of recent writers in languages other than English, but even so I got much more from Fantasy: A Short History than I expected, and it can have my vote in return. You can get it here.
I also really enjoyed Colourfields by Paul Kincaid. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
It is clear that this volume [The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, by Mark Bould and Sherry Vint] is intended as a teaching aid, primarily for undergraduates with little or no previous acquaintance with the genre. In this it works well: it is brisk and breezy, throws in enough theory to seem serious without being weighty, and lets much of the argument rest on the numerous booklists that are embedded throughout the text. The booklists constantly direct the reader outside the text, and while no work that appears in a list is allowed any substantive discussion in the text, taken alone the lists do act as a reasonable if far from comprehensive guide to many of the most significant works of the genre. So, as a starting point for someone coming fresh to the study of the genre, you could do far worse. It’s not perfect, there are inevitably omissions, and the fact that any work discussed in the body of the book is excluded from any list leads to problems, one of the more egregious of which I’ll discuss later. The authors do make every effort to avoid gender or racial bias, making a point throughout the work of discussing books by women or non-white authors equally with those by white males. Though there are moments when this seems to prioritise a minor work by a woman over a major work by a man, in the main this can only be celebrated. With this in mind, it is a pity that, in a genre that is becoming increasingly international, they confine their discussion almost entirely to Anglophone authors. While some authors in translation are unavoidable (Verne, Čapek), authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are mentioned only in a passage about Science Fiction Studies and none of their titles is even listed; others fare even less well.
I stand by what I wrote when I read it a few months ago:
A substantial collection of essays by Paul Kincaid, who is one of the few people to have been both Administrator of the Hugo Awards and a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the other two are David Langford, and me). They are almost all reviews of other critical works, hence the title, with commentary inserted by the author to contextualise and explain a little more. I had read very few of the books described here, so it made me realise how much more there is to read about sf, and will spur me to add some more to my bookshelves
While I particularly enjoyed the pieces on Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, I’m afraid I am still unconvinced of the added value of the Marxist analysis of Frederic James and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, or of the literary merits of M. John Harrison; but maybe that proves Kincaid’s larger point, that there can be no single definition of science fiction, which he pushes in a gentlemanly way. I learned a lot from this, as I had expected. You can get Colourfields here.
It’s a classic collection of pieces by one of our great critics, and deserves to be celebrated.
The only other book that I got hold of in this category was That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
During this period, witchcraft in the popular imaginary was a fractured signifier. It suggested both sexual empowerment and sexual enslavement; collectivist naturalism and individualistic consumerism; science and superstition; intellectual control and hedonistic abandon. But how could this character come to be a feminist icon, a misogynist boogeyman, a harbinger of religious decline, a sex symbol, a trend, and a joke all at once? Using a number of films from a wide range of different contexts (from studio blockbusters to auteurist art films to pornography to exploitation movies), Part I will trace the history of the countercultural witch film cycle, looking at this figure across her various contexts to suggest that in a decade haunted by questions of belief—in alternative communities and more equitable futures on the one hand and conservative religious and patriotic ideals on the other—the witchʼs evolution as a symbol of mysterious and arcane power reflects these shifting landscapes, particularly in the Womenʼs Liberation Movement. As Jon Lewis put it in his book, Road Trip to Nowhere,
[t]oday the movies from the counterculture era that continue to matter were in their day aberrations, movies that got made despite industry policy, movies made elsewhere (overseas, in the B-industry, by independent contractors working on some half-baked deal with a studio)—movies nobody with money and clout at the time gave half a chance at success.³
³ Lewis, 2022, 3.
I’m afraid I did not get very far; I am just not personally very interested in witch films, and while the author promises to make the connection with wider issues of society and gender, it depended too much on the bits I didn’t care so much about. I am sure that it is a perfectly fine read for those who care more about witch films than I do. You can get That Very Witch here.
The voter booklet (for which, again, many thanks) includes extracts from the other three finalists, enough to make me feel confident in ranking them as follows:
Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
Colourfields, by Paul Kincaid
Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre, ed. Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Writing the Magic, eds. Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst
That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas
Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914, by Kate Holterhoff
In my earlier write-up of the shortlists, I noted that the last of these was owned by precisely zero users of Goodreads, LibraryThing or StoryGraph, and is also by some way the most expensive shortlisted book in any category. The extract provided for BSFA voters shows only the most slender of links to science fiction or fantasy literature, and I really wonder why anyone would have nominated it for a BSFA Award, let alone enough voters to get it on the shortlist.
(Update: the winner was Colourfields.)
Best Novel
My sole vote goes to When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift. the second paragraph of the third chapter (a long ‘un) is:
After the lockdowns, my parents started using my grandparents for free childcare whenever they could get away with it, and I spent a lot more weekends at the house in Herne Hill. This arrangement suited everyone very well with the exception of Gran, who clearly recognized she was being taken for a ride but felt unable to voice her dissent. Grandad and I remained great pals. I could talk to him about anything, and as I got older I talked more and more, and he’d sit and listen. Truly he had the patience of a saint, for he’d smile and ask questions back, and if I finally ran out of things to say, he would think for a while and then dig out some obscure and fascinating fact, like how the sewers worked. As if I were a jay and he were giving me acorns to stash away. My brain has always been a buzzy place, sometimes an overwhelming place. When I was with Grandad, the buzz quietened. He understood that I needed to get things out, or my thoughts might become too much. When I think of Grandad now, I remember his face, and his gentle voice, but mostly it’s the feeling that’s stayed with me. The feeling of being safe.
This is a great novel about the coming ecological catastrophe and the resilience of society in Britain (though we assume that similar stuff is happening elsewhere), told intimately through the story of two women who barely know each other, with the effect of climate change on them and their families delicately portrayed. There is despair, but there is also hope. I feel it really catches the Zeitgeist, and it gets my vote. You can get When There Are Wolves Again here.
(Update: the winner was indeed When There Are Wolves Again.)
The only other book on the shortlist that I have read is A Granite Silence, by Nina Allan. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
I have always found reassurance in repetition, an aid to thought. Old photographs of Aberdeen docks show a diverse, rambunctious ecosystem teeming with life, a maze of lumber yards and cattle sheds, warehouses and sawmills, a complex, symbiotic machinery geared towards the transport of timber and textiles and livestock, including people. The docks are still busy. Ferries leave for Orkney and Shetland throughout the day. Container ships call at Aberdeen regularly to unload their cargoes. Service vessels bound for the rigs are still based here in the harbour. And the old names are everywhere: Hall, Hood, Duthie and Russell, the great shipbuilding dynasties of Aberdeen’s past embedded in its present, in its street names and parks, carved permanently into the granite from which the town was raised.
It’s an fascinating and well-written book, about the murder of a child in Aberdeen in 1934; Nina Allan takes us in and out of the investigation and weaves different facets of herself into the story, including several breaking-the-fourth-wall moments. I’m giving it five stars on the various book sites.
But I’m not voting for it here, because I don’t think that it qualifies as science fiction or fantasy, and I think that the BSFA Awards should celebrate works of science fiction and fantasy. I know that yesterday I admitted that I am voting for a short story which is about fans of fantasy literature, rather than actually being fantastical itself; but A Granite Silence isn’t even addressing sf or fantasy, it’s a novel about a real life crime with no sfnal subject matter. Congratulations to the author on writing an excellent book, but it does not belong on this shortlist and isn’t getting my vote. Still, you can get A Granite Silence here, and probably should.
For various different reasons I did not read the other three finalists. They are:
Project Hanuman, by Stewart Hotston
The Salt Oracle, by Lorraine Wilson
Edge of Oblivion, by Kirk Weddell
I covered Best Short Fiction, Best Non-Fiction (Short), Best Shorter Fiction and Best Translated Short Fiction yesterday.
Belinda stepped outside the time machine, feeling her pumps scrape against a pavement that her feet did not belong on.
Not that anyone cares other than me, but James Goss has consistently been one of the best Doctor Who prose writers for years, and has never won an award as far as I know.
Once upon a time a long way from Croydon, a child was born, the fifty-fifth child to be born that year in the North Zone in BC-ville. The Nativity Robots decanted her from the amniotic chambers and, with huge smiles upon their chests, duly proclaimed her Sasha 55.
I did not read any of the other three shortlisted books in this category. They are:
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
Secrets of the First School, by T. L. Huchu
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel, by Jendia Gammon writing as J. Dianne Dotson
I did consider reading Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping, which is far ahead of all the other shortlisted books in any category in terms of public recognition, but it’s 400 more pages and I suspected that there was other stuff on the ballot in other categories that I would enjoy more.
(Update: the winner was Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution.)
Belinda stepped outside the time machine, feeling her pumps scrape against a pavement that her feet did not belong on.
The episode that this novelisation is based on was broadcast on Easter Sunday this year, and I wrote:
Lux was the episode shown at Easter and I watched it with other fans in Belfast. The basic concept of yet another ancient deity emerging – which turns out to be rather easily defeated – didn’t appeal to me, and the acknowledgement of segregation felt a bit by-the-numbers, but I loved the episode’s fanservice, reminiscent of The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who. Everyone’s favourite episode is Blink, right?
James Goss has picked this up and run with it, and turned in another cracking novelisation (following City of Death, The Pirate Planet and The Giggle). It’s a story with several epic shifts of scale – the small-minded tableau of a Florida town, the big imaginative expanse of the fans’ cramped living room, and the superhuman struggle between the Doctor and a rogue god. The fourth-wall-breaking scenes of the Doctor and Belinda with the fans, Hasan, Robyn and Lizzie, are really excellent, and I found I had something in my eye at the end. As usual with this writer, recommended. You can get Doctor Who: Lux here.
For the 60th anniversary, we have been given a slightly weird thing: a 24-part story featuring a time-travelling assassin called Doom, in which the Doctor figures only occasionally, told across various media with, frankly, varying degrees of success. The two big problems are that murder isn’t actually all that funny a topic, so it’s awkward to find the tone for a set of funny stories about assassination; and that Doom actually isn’t a very good assassin, in that all of her missions seem to end in failure.
Hour One, by James Goss (online story) – third paragraph:
“I’m dying.”
As my regular reader knows, I’m normally a huge fan of James Goss’s writing, but I’m afraid that this first chapter made very little sense to me. You can read it here for free.
Four Hours of Doom’s Day, by Jacqueline Rayner, art by Russ Leach, Mike Summers and Roger Langridge (comic strip supplement to DWM #592) – second frame of third story:
Again, I normally enjoy Jacqueline Rayner’s prose, and again, I felt that this was far too rushed; the four stories have only 16 pages between them, and the first has only two. We get an appearance from the Sixth Doctor, and separately we also get Jo Grant, River Song, Cybermen and Nestenes. But there’s really not much there.
A Doctor in the House? by Jody Houser, art by Roberta Ingranata, Warnia K. Sahadewa, Richard Starkings & Jimmy Betancourt (Titan comics) – second frame of third story:
Given a bit more space to breathe in – 64 pages across the four stories – I enjoyed this much more; also there’s a nice consistency in that Missy appears in each of the four, creating a fun dynamic with our heroine, and the Twelfth Doctor turns up in the last of them. It’s not yet out as a single volume but you can get the two issues here and here.
AI am the Doctor, by Mario M. Mentasti (video game)
I downloaded the Lost in Time videogame purely so that I could get to this installment of the Doom’s Day story. It is an exceptionally dull game, where you don’t have to do much except poke at the screen to score points, interrupted by occasional bits of plot. If you play the game for long enough, you get to the two Doom-related bits. I poked my way through to the first of these, realised that I had not absorbed any of the plot, closed the game down and have not started it up again.
Extraction Point, by M.G. Harris (novel) – second paragraph of third section:
Huh, cave art. Didn’t expect that.
Four more stories in which the Ninth Doctor appears briefly in the first and the Second Doctor plays a larger role in the last. (There is a confusing misprint on page 220: “The Doctor was already lowering herself into the elevator” which from context should clearly be “himself”.) It’s Harris’s first contribution to Who, and as with some of the other Doom’s Day components I found it a bit rushed. Still, interesting use of shape-changing aliens – the Kraals and Slitheen do have that in common. You can get it here.
Wrong Place at the Right Time, by Garner Haines (video game)
As mentioned above, I lost patience with the Lost in Time game, which this is part of, and did not get to this bit.
Four from Doom’s Day, by Darren Jones (audiobooks)
Four more stories, of which my favourite was the first, read by Sooz Kempener (who also reads the last of the four) and involving Ian and Barbara on a Mediterranean cruise. The Twelfth Doctor shows up in the last of them. You can get them here.
Dying Hours, by Jacqueline Rayner, Robert Valentine, Simon Clark and Lizzie Hopley (Big Finish audio plays)
These are the only parts of Doom’s Day that actually feature actor Sooz Kempener in the title role, along with Becky Wright as her controller Terri. Probably each of the audio plays took more combined creative effort from all the the professionals involved than any of the other segments, and it certainly pays off; you can’t rush an hour-long story with real actors into two pages of text. Even so, the four plays have various levels of success; the one that worked best for me was the last, The Crowd by Lizzie Hopley, which brings Doom into contact with the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard (a welcome return from India Fisher) at the scene of the murder of Thomas Becket. You can get it here.
Out of Time, by James Goss (online story – third paragraph:
The Doctor.
Actually this is short, funny and to the point; the First Doctor shows up and sorts everything out, though in such a way that, once you pause for thought, you slightly wonder if it all really mattered that much in the first place. You can read it for free here.
And finally, there’s a game called Doom’s Minute on the BBC website. It took me a while to work out how to play it, and it’s not all that exciting, but you can play it here.
I can see why the BBC decided to try and do a multiplatform story – it’s a good idea to try and draw those who may not have been into all of the available varieties of media together. Sooz Kempener is a great performer and it’s a shame that we only actually get her in the audio plays towards the end. But this honestly felt rather rushed in places; the bits that worked best for me – the Big Finish audios and the Titan comics – were probably the ones that took the most energy and creativity, and it shows.
So, I’m rather far behind with writing up my recent Big Finish listening – last time I mentioned it was in July. Three boxed sets of audio plays to cover quickly in summary here.
My favourite of these is a set of three stories with the Tenth Doctor and Classic Companions. All three bring David Tennant together with John Leeson as K9. The first, Splinters by John Dorney, features Louise Jameson as Leela; the second, The Stuntman by Lizzie Hopley, has Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, and the third, Quantum of Axos by Roy Gill, has Sophie Aldred as Ace. All three stories have fantastic chemistry between Tennant and the others – the arrivals of Leela and K9 are the first changes to the regular cast he remembers as a young fan, and clearly everyone is thrilled to bits to be performing with each other. It was also interesting that all three stories play with themes of identity, memory and nostalgia, which always appeal to me too. Dorney, Hopley and Gill are among Big Finish’s more reliable writers, and they have delivered here. Strongly recommended. Here’s a trailer to whet your appetite.
Another New Who spinoff comes in the form of The Year of Martha Jones, set during the year that Martha travels the world while the aged-up Doctor is the Master’s prisoner. We’ve already had a print anthology set in this period; this however is better, getting off to an excellent start in The Last Diner by the always reliable James Goss, a more Western-y The Silver Medal by Tim Foley, and a well-executed climax in Deceived by Matt Fitton. Martha is joined by Adjoa Andoh playing her mother Francine, who has apparently escaped the Master, and Serin Ibrahim as old friend Holly. (Also Clare Louise Connolly plays the Toclafance in all three stories.) Guest stars include Marina Sirtis, best known as Deanna Troi in Star Trek, in the first episode.
The fifth set of Ninth Doctor adventures, Back to Earth, sees Christopher Ecclestone’s time as the Doctor on audio overtaking his record on TV. To be honest I was less wowed by this trilogy than by some of the others, but these are all decent enough stories. Station to Station by Robert Valentine has the Doctor helping a young woman (Indigo Griffiths) out of a strange predicament in a deserted railway station. The False Dimitry by Sarah Grochala brings a Whovian spin to a corner of Russian history, the title character playedby Alexander Arnold. And Auld Lang Syne, another one by Time Foley, has a spooky New Year’s Eve party where all is not what it seems; veteran Wendy Craig makes an appearance as the great-aunt. I got the sense that Big Finish is trying out younger writers and actors in this range, which is fine. Here, again is a trailer.
I’m also way behind on noting the Fourth Doctor box sets that I have been listening to, but I think I’ll save those for another post – the above three are all worth getting anyway.
