I wrote this piece two weeks ago, on Sunday 28 June, and later learned to my deep sorrow and dismay that Justin Richards, probably the most prolific Doctor Who writer of all time, had died that very day, aged 64. I never met him or corresponded with him, but his writing was usually reliable and sometimes brilliant. I am sure that I still have some of his work to write up here, but, sadly, no more will be produced.
After opening with The Thing from the Sea, the BBC audiobooks range commissioned three stories from Justin Richards to commemorate the end of the First World War. This is a tricky subject for Who, though not as tricky as Irish history or Hitler’s Germany, especially since (SPOILER) the villain is a well-enough intentioned chap who just wants to stop the killing from happening by the means of time travel.
The first story, Men of War, has Peter Purves telling a story of the First Doctor, Steven Taylor and Sara Kingdom materialising in 1916 to find that the Battle of the Somme has not started on schedule and that Time is trying to reclaim those who should have died. It’s bleak and creepy. Purves tells the story not as Steven but as a British officer trying to make sense of the madness around him. You can get Men of War here.
Horrors of War had come to my notice before as one of the couple of dozen Who stories set in Belgium. This time it’s Katy Manning telling the story of the Third Doctor and Jo Grant arriving at a field hospital near Ypres, where they meet Annie Grantham (who is the narrating character, so as with Peter Purves, Katy Manning does her own Who persona in the third person). This was of particular interest to me because they all go back to Sarajevo to observe the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, which has gone askew in this timeline. I twitched a bit at some of the details which don’t match the Bosnian geography, but I can’t blame Richards for doing less research on Sarajevo than I have (see here and here). Apart from that, I appreciated what Richards was doing. You can get Horrors of War here.
Fortunes of War concludes the trilogy by bringing the Sixth Doctor together with the captain from the first story and the nurse from the second, Colin Baker narrating it in character. They end up investigating the origin of the mystery in a remote forest in northwestern Germany (oddly enough, I too was in a remote forest in northwestern Germany shortly after listening to this) and trying to close the wobbling time loops. I found it very satisfactory. You can get Fortunes of War here.
As I said up front, this is a difficult subject for Who to tackle, but I think it was done well by Richards and the performers, with some great soundscaping as well. Recommended, even now that we are some years past the anniversary.
