Tag Archives: Mandi Symonds

Doctor Who: Philip Hinchcliffe Presents… The Ghosts of Gralstead. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, Carolyn Seymour, Gethin Anthony, Martin Hutson, Emerald O’ Hanrahan, Alan Cox, Ivanno Jeremiah, Andy Secombe, Sean Carlsen, Andrew French, Mandi Symonds.

The fourth Doctor was arguably never better than when thrust into the tale of the Gothic persuasion. It was a running theme throughout his tenure in the shoes of the Timelord that the Gothic, in one shape or another would feature heavily and the macabre would be accompanying with relish.

Doctor Who: Philip Hinchcliffe Presents… The Ghosts of Gralstead. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish. full post

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

Doctor Who: Revenge Of The Swarm. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Philip Olivier, John Leeson, Mandi Symonds, Maggie Service, John Heffernan, Phyllida Nash, Siobhan Redmond, John Dorney, Paul Panting.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, preferably being poured from a bucket with ice cubes the size of Norwegian glacier formation and over the head of someone you don’t like whilst they are sunbathing. Failing that, to be mastered in the form that Science Fiction adores, with plenty of back story and with an enemy that doesn’t quite fit the top echelons of master criminals or war mongering civilisations.

Doctor Who: Revenge Of The Swarm. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish. full post

(651 words, estimated 2:36 mins reading time)

Doctor Who: The Abandoned. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, Stephanie Cole, Mandi Symonds, Andy Snowball, Nigel Fairs.

Imagination is the strongest, most potent weapon that humanity possesses. The ability to imagine the best and prepare for the worst, sometimes of our own species making and volition; to see the innate beauty in a single word, to have the ability to conjure up an imaginary best friend that sees you through the loneliness of childhood or to take the inventiveness, the sheer creative splendour, and turn into something that last for hundreds of years. Sometimes though imagination can, as to paraphrase Julius Robert    Oppenheimer, can be the destroyer of worlds.

Doctor Who: The Abandoned. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish. full post

(535 words, estimated 2:08 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)

1984, Theatre Review. Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Mark Arends, Tim Dutton, Stephen Fewell, Christopher Patrick Nolan, Matthew Spencer, Gavin Spokes, Mandi Symonds, Hara Yannas, Richard Bremmer, Joshua Higgott.

To do justice to arguably one of the finest pieces of English Literature of the 20th Century on stage takes a team so immersed into what they are trying to achieve, that all else is secondary. To bring to life the horror that awaits Winston Smith from the spectre of Big Brother that is stamped like an impregnable tattoo all over the face of decency in 1984 takes a fantastic director, an adaptor of work who can make the simmering tension boil over again and again and two men you can believe in from start to finish to capture the spirit of a nation, of a world that has become the stuff of nightmares.

1984, Theatre Review. Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool. full post

(480 words, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)