thisbluespirit | What I'm Listening To

I finished off the remaining two Christmas at the Wells installments, The Silver King and The Shaughran, but they had a different adapter/director and were not as wonderful as the first four were (Trelawny, London Assurance, A Woman of No Importance & The Schoolmistress), but The Shaughran was quite good anyway. The Silver King did at least have Peter Jeffrey in, ruining things just the way he does on TV, though. (Peter Jeffrey has to be the most consistently villainous of the Old Brit TV Villain of the Week Brigade. He's so rarely good, and when he is, people just burn him at the stake! The BBC burned him to death twice that year, though, once for being good and once for being evil, so he can't win. Evil just had worse hair.)

I then discovered that BBC Sounds had some more Big Finish Audios up at the moment, and tried to listen to some War Doctor installments (I listened to the first one when it was a freebie ages ago), but they were on for a limited time and because of the Time War, they all had Daleks in and I object to listening to Daleks that much. I'm still annoyed about the whole Eighth Doctor run with Molly, because there were SO MANY DALEKS the whole time. Plus, the Time War is kind of depressing anyway. So I abandoned John Hurt (sorry) and moved onto the available for 1 year Classic Who offerings and went straight for:

Out of Time with both Ten and Four, which was very enjoyable, although I did not look at anything other than multi-Doctor action, and when they were wondering who the mysterious attackers breaking into this place beyond space and time could be, and then they turned out to be DALEKS, I was in revolt. Put down those damned Daleks, Big Finish!! I did like it a lot anyway, and tbf they did have the Daleks right there on the cover, I just was listening in the dark and didn't have my glasses on when I was fiddling about with my phone.

Then, Fallen Angels, which was Five + Weeping Angels from the Classic Doctors, New Monsters range, which sounded like fun and had Sacha Dhawan and Diane Morgan as a honeymooning couple sent back to the 16th C, and also Michaelangelo. It was pretty good! (I liked the way it avoided screwing up the Amy & Rory thing as well, although poor Josh and Gabby. Do they have fic, I wonder? Probably not, alas.) Although where Five, who has no companion-free gaps at all, had mislaid his companions during this, idk. Nobody mentioned it. I assume it was in the Nyssa-only period and she was Doing Science somewhere and just shrugged and got on with it while he went running about Rome.

(BBC Sounds is free to use and not region-locked, so anyone who also wants to listen to anything they've currently got up there can. Fallen Angels is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gsxqhf )

Now, I'm back to the various Martin Jarvis things I collected, this time with a BBC Radio adaptation of Guards! Guards! (1992), which has John Wood as Vimes, Melvyn Hayes as Nobby, Stephen Thorne as Colon, and Robert Gwilym (brother of Mike) as Carrot, plus Martin Jarvis as the Narrator. (It also claims that Death is being played by himself, but somehow I don't believe them. I suspect it must be Stephen Thorne!)

Anyway, it seems a really good adaptation so far, and I'm enjoying it. The Narrator sometimes gets to be a bit meta and actually physically in the city sometimes, which feels right (and also means that they had Martin Jarvis meet Death in a dark alley at the end of Episode 1, which I appreciated a lot.) I'm nearly at the end of Episode 3, so almost halfway through.

If you'd like to listen to it, you can stream or download it free here at the Internet Archive.