With a recently-released Katy Manning Companion Chronicle still sizzling on the shelf, I didn’t have to think too hard about which previously-uncharted third Doctor adventure I’d be tackling for Beyond History’s End – particularly as it sported one of the most outlandish and irresistible covers that I recall ever seeing on a Big Finish title. A pink velvety cat, a foul professor, a chilling baby doll, a purple-bearded puppet with a ray gun and three blind drunk mice encircle an evidently-irked Jo Grant. It’s not your customary Who recipe, I’ll grant you, but lost amongst the CSO showiness of the series’ early days in colour, James Goss’s semi-satire on light entertainment feels oddly at home.
Despite having produced more hours of Doctor Who than even the BBC, The Scorchies is positive proof that Big Finish Productions are every bit as innovative and as intrepid as ever they were. The two episodes that comprise this story may each be bookended by a familiar Delia Derbyshire ditty, but what lies in between is another show altogether – The Scorchies Show – on which this week’s guest just happens to be the Doctor’s captured assistant. Listening to the production, it’s immediately apparent how much fun its writer had using just about every trashy telly trope employed in the 1970s to tell his story, and even more so how the cast and crew revelled in making his wacky vision an acoustic reality. From Jo being forced to “make a thing” out of bog roll to the series’ first-ever musical cliffhanger, The Scorchies delights in eschewing the structure and staples of not only Doctor Who, but drama full stop.
As the first episode opens, the listener almost feels as if they’re joining a Season 8 serial’s third or fourth episode, as the events that have led Jo to her prime time terror have all passed, and all that remains is for the Doctor and UNIT to mount their rescue and put paid to the bizarre alien threat. Events seem to take place in real time, as if they’re being broadcast live as part of The Scorchies Show – even the deliberately-artificial flashbacks that bring the listener up to speed and, later, explore the “sad story” of the telly-mad species that would eventually become the Scorchies. There isn’t a moment in this production that feels like an audio book; there isn’t even a moment that feels like two-hand audio drama. From its first moment to its last, The Scorchies is the soundtrack to a Saturday night variety show, somehow all of its many colourful characters coming out of the mouths of versatile voice artists Melvyn Hayes and Katy Manning (and equally-versatile Blacklight Studio songsters Richard Fox and Lauren Yason).
If this story has a flaw, it’s that it’s too effective a send-up of the shows that it spoofs. It’s so incessantly shrill and so offensively jaunty that I found my brow permanently furrowed all the way through it, as if in actual pain. I didn’t that Big Finish would ever outdo the crippling Cuddlesome, but it seems we have a new champ.
The Scorchies is available to download from Big Finish for just £7.99. The CD version (which also comes with a free download) is just a pound extra.
The Grange is haunted, so they say. This stately home in the depths of Devon has been the site of many an apparition. And now people are turning up dead. The ghosts are wild in the forest. But the Doctor doesn’t believe in ghosts.
The TARDIS follows a twist in the vortex to the village of Staffham in 1977 and discovers something is very wrong with time. But spectral highwaymen and cavaliers are the least of the Doctor’s worries.
For the Grange is owned by the sinister Jalnik, and Jalnik has a scheme two thousand years in the making. Only the Doctor and Leela stand between him and the destruction of history itself. It’s the biggest adventure of their lives – but do they have the time?
For the Grange is owned by the sinister Jalnik, and Jalnik has a scheme two thousand years in the making. Only the Doctor and Leela stand between him and the destruction of history itself. It’s the biggest adventure of their lives – but do they have the time?
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