Tag Archives: Big Finish

Charlotte Pollard, The Fall of the House of Pollard. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: India Fisher, Anneka Wills, Terence Hardiman, Charlie Norfolk, David Dobson, Michael Maloney.

 

The intrepid travellers in the life of Charley Pollard have long been teased over the family history of the Edwardian Adventuress. There have been smatterings, the odd peek and the rare smidgen of information of how the young Charlotte Pollard grew to be the woman she has most definitely become and how it could bring about The Fall of the House of Pollard.

Charlotte Pollard, The Fall of the House of Pollard. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish. full post

(506 words, estimated 2:01 mins reading time)

Charlotte Pollard, The Shadow At The End Of The World. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: India Fisher, Jacqueline King, Abigail McKern, Nicola Weeks, Lucy May Barker, Nicholas Briggs, Michael Maloney, James Joyce.

Charlotte Pollard, adventuress, traveller in space and time and once close friend and confident of The Doctor, a woman born on the day that the S.S. Titanic sank and who, as history will have it, died on the Airship 101, a woman who it seems was born to be a magnet for trouble and exploits, especially when cornered at The Shadow at the End of the World.

Charlotte Pollard, The Shadow At The End Of The World. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish. full post

(554 words, estimated 2:13 mins reading time)

The Avengers: The Lost Episodes. The Radioactive Man. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Anthony Howell, Julian Wadham, Lucy Briggs-Owen, Phil Mulryne, John Banks, Tim Bentinck, Beth Chalmers, Anjella Mackintosh, Richard Franklin, Kieran Bew, Colin Baker.

Some stories are just so timeless that they can be placed almost anywhere within a certain epoch and they would still resonate and be explosive as if set with a timer, a red and yellow wire attached and the words caution, contains volatile and unstable elements stamped in black broad letters on its outer box.

The Avengers: The Lost Episodes. The Radioactive Man. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish. full post

(563 words, estimated 2:15 mins reading time)

Doctor Who: Destroy The Infinite. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, David Selby, Michael Felton Stevens, Hywel Morgan, Clive Mantle, Christine Roberts, Ian Hallard.

There is a new villain in town, Earth and its associated planets are under threat from a despicable evil and only one man can save them, one man, a savage of impeccable understanding and loyalty and a strange Blue Box who never takes the Doctor where he wants to go but always where he is needed.

Doctor Who: Destroy The Infinite. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish. full post

(509 words, estimated 2:02 mins reading time)

Doctor Who: Dark Eyes 2. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Paul McGann, Nicola Walker, Ruth Bradley, Alex Macqueen, Chris Porter, David Dobson, John Dorney, Nicholas Briggs, Brian Shelley, Ian Brooker, Adrian Mackinder, Andrew Knott, Joseph Radcliffe, David Silby, Jo Castleton, Ian Hallard, Jacqueline King, Natalie Burt, David Shaw-Parker, Frank Skinner.

Doctor Who: Dark Eyes 2. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish. full post

(701 words, estimated 2:48 mins reading time)

Blake’s 7: Fractures. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Gareth Thomas, Paul Darrow, Sally Knyvette, Michael Keating, Jan Chappell, Alistair Lock, Brian Croucher, Bethan Walker.

Nothing quite makes Science Fiction more entertaining than when the cast of your favourite programme have been set a problem which drives at the very psyche, the paranoia of the mind and the suspicion in those that you would normally defend with your life. It has been done so many times on screen and the tension it creates can be one of palpable enjoyment and dread that it might spill over too far. It is about the timing of the paranoia and suspicion and knowing when to pull back, leaving just the trickle of distrust seeping through after all is seemingly resolved.

Blake’s 7: Fractures. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish. full post

(503 words, estimated 2:01 mins reading time)

The Avengers, The Lost Episodes. Brought To Book. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Anthony Howell, Julian Wadham, Lucy Briggs-Owen, Colin Baker, Adrian Lukis, Tim Bentinck, Alan Cox, Blake Ritson, George Rainsford, Camilla Power, Sophie Aldred, Philip Mulryne, Kieran Bew, Richard Franklin.

With the murder of his fiancé Peggy still haunting him, Doctor David Keel finds himself further embroiled in the plans of the mysterious John Steed and his attempt to bring down the latest in organised crime in London in the second story re-made by Big Finish’s The Avengers: The Lost Episodes.

The Avengers, The Lost Episodes. Brought To Book. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish. full post

(446 words, estimated 1:47 mins reading time)

Blake’s 7: The Liberator Chronicles. The Turing Test. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Paul Darrow, Michael Keating.

With its distinctive theme tune and great stories, it is no wonder that Blake’s 7, like Sapphire and Steel and Space 1999 became interwoven into the fabric of British society in the 1970s. Televised Science Fiction was having its golden era, alongside the only programme of the day to carry on into the 21st Century, Doctor Who. This was a halcyon time for anybody who regarded the genre as essential viewing and who would make time into their busy lives to see what happened next to the likes of Johanna Lumley and David McCallum in Sapphire and Steel,  Space 1999’s Martin Landau, Barbara Bain and Catherine Schell and Blake’s 7, Paul Darrow, Gareth Thomas, Michael Keating and Sally Knyvette.

Blake’s 7: The Liberator Chronicles. The Turing Test. Audio Drama Review, Big Finish. full post

(668 words, estimated 2:40 mins reading time)

Doctor Who: Afterlife. Audio Drama 181, Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Cast: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Philip Olivier, Amy Pemberton, Jean Boht, Mandi Symonds, Jonathan Forbes, Andrew Dickens.

It depends on your point of view, but what if there really is life after death? How could you be sure that whatever higher power, what god or demon has had you in their charge whilst your memory has begun to fade in the minds you left behind, that they won’t have cheated you in yet another cosmic joke.

Doctor Who: Afterlife. Audio Drama 181, Big Finish. full post

(573 words, estimated 2:18 mins reading time)

Doctor Who: 1963: The Assassination Games. Audio Drama 180. Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Simon Williams, Pamela Salem, Karen Gledhill, Hugh Ross, Oliver Cotton, Gemma Saunders, Gerald Kyd, Alisdair Simpson.

No matter where The Doctor goes in time and space, it seems there is a small part of that is drawn like a moth to wibbly wobbly ball of flame to the events circulating around the year 1963. Of course it is a natural time period to write about as well as being the birth of the television programme that would go on to be a world-wide phenomenon.

Doctor Who: 1963: The Assassination Games. Audio Drama 180. Big Finish. full post

(531 words, estimated 2:07 mins reading time)