On the whole, the BBC audio series by Paul Magrs with Tom Baker reprising his Fourth Doctor have not really grabbed me. But I felt that The Hexford Invasion, the fourth of the Serpent Crest series, was a significant improvement, largely because the excellent Susan Jameson is given her head as the Doctor's housekeeper / companion Mrs Wibbsey. She ( Read more... )

Latest of the Serpent Crest series of Tom Baker audios, with the Doctor and Susan Jameson's Mrs Wibbsey trapped in an underground cavern filled with treasure and a boy called Aladdin (who appears to be the same boy from the two previous audios and is certainly also played by Guy Harvey). It's a bit of a run-around tale, whose most interesting idea ( Read more... )

The third series of BBC Doctor Who audios by Paul Magrs, starring Tom Baker, have drastically improved on the first two by shifting to full cast plays and not having Richard Franklin as Mike Yates. The first episode here had us in a cyborg version of the later Russian Empire; here we have something narrsty in a Victorian vicarage, the vicar being ( Read more... )

( Serpent Crest 1: Tsar Wars - new Fourth Doctor audio )

I think that this was the first anthology of short stories featuring the first eight Doctors produced by the BBC, back in 1998. I had heard a couple of them previously from the audio release narrated by the late Nicholas Courtney and Sophie Aldred, but it's nice to have the hard copy. The audio version memorably included the first Iris story, "Old ( Read more... )

More Paul Magrs: I managed to listen to the second and third parts of his latest series of audios staring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor before setting off for Moldova last weekend and forgetting my MP3 player, and now that the January Big Finish releases are out I shall listen to them before I finish the Demon Quest sequence.

I rather liked The ( Read more... )

This is the first of Magrs' Doctor Who novels, and also the first to feature the peculiar Iris Wildthyme, who claims to be a the Doctor's girlfriend from the old days in Gallifrey, driving around in a Tardis in the shape of a double-decker London bus. I find Magrs a bit variable but this was a good start to his Who career, a quest narrative set on ( Read more... )

When I read brendan_moody's review of the recent Big Finish Companion Chrionicle starring Katy Manning as both Jo Grant and Irish Wildthyme, I thought of posting a comment on his livejournal saying that I felt he had shared, in considerable and spoiler-free detail, my own reasons for feeling that this could have been a better story - in particular, his first ( Read more... )

I had thought I would try and get into the habit of posting about each new Doctor Who audio play as I finished them, but the hectic events of the last couple of weeks meant that this was one intention that fell by the wayside. Three new Big Finish audios to write up, then, and the new Fourth Doctor play from the BBC. As usual I'm doing them in ( Read more... )

This is a Tenth Doctor and Martha novel, set on a wilderness world where a crazed scientist and his family are holding out against a monstrous creature which is devouring the planet's entire surface, helped by a domestic computer (which is also derganged). I thought it was a pretty poor effort. I hate cute robots, and this book has too many of them ( Read more... )