BIG START: The Daunting and Wonderful Prospect of the Big Finish Audio Dramas

Every Doctor Who fan has their favourite Doctor. For the majority, this will be one of the first people they saw in the role, particularly if they started watching as children. Personally, I am rather fond of Sylvester McCoy, my first Doctor, who I first saw at age 6. When this Doctor departs, or when you have seen all of the episodes they recorded it can be rather heart-wrenching, and can leave one thirsting for more of the same. Many of the Doctors, particularly towards the end of the classic series, got short shrift and appeared in few episodes, which makes their departure even harder to take. As viewers thrilling to the adventures of an immortal time traveller, we know we cannot ever possibly be privy to everything the Doctor does, even if we spent every minute of our comparatively brief lives glued to the TV. But there is often a creeping  doubt, especially when the Doctor refers to some adventure that happened off screen, that we might be missing something extra special.

The good news is, there’s a wealth of extra adventures available featuring several of the classic Doctors, and I’m not just talking about novels and short stories and comic books. These may feature the characters, but it’s not quite the same, is it? Without the actor playing the part, speaking those words in their inimitable style, it doesn’t quite feel as if this is really, the Doctor. 

Big Finish Productions have been producing full cast audio dramas for many years now, featuring the voice talents of many of the original actors from the TV series, including Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann. These are usually told in the same format of the TV series (either multipart stories, told across several episodes of roughly 25 minutes each, or a single 50 minute episode). They also very much remain true to the style and spirit of the TV series, and many who have listened to them claim that some of the Big Finish Dramas rank among Doctor Who’s greatest ever adventures. 

The bad news is that the audio format can seem rather daunting, even impenetrable, to many people. Without an image to constantly provide information on what exactly is happening, you are forced to pay very close attention to everything that is said. If you miss the wrong line of exposition, you can find yourself lost and bewildered, wondering where the characters are and what they are doing. The lack of narration on these types of drama has several consequences. Firstly, it makes the dramas seem closer to the actual TV show, only without the pictures, rather than an audio book. Secondly, it means you have to imagine what the aliens and spacecraft and planets look like. If you have a good imagination, this can be a blessing. If your imagination is a little rusty, then it’s a mixed blessing. There are no wobbly sets or bubble-wrap monsters to ruin the atmosphere, but there are no spectacular CGI landscapes or Dalek battles to feast your eyes on either. 

It may sound as though I am trying to discourage people from trying the audio dramas, but I’m not. It’s surprising how quickly you get used to not having anything to look at or having any information fed to you visually. I have so far listened to four audio dramas (Shada, Storm Warning, Thin Ice and Crime of the Century) and am currently on my fifth (Animal). I would recommend all of these, although I take it from reviews I have read that Big Finish have produced much better dramas than these. Once you take that plunge and acclimatise yourself to a new medium, the audio dramas seem a very short step apart from the TV shows, indeed even like a natural extension of them. Voila, the amount of episodes starring your favourite Doctor just multiplied. 

The other major barrier to entering the Doctor Who expanded universe, is that Big Finish produce their dramas in more-or-less random order. If you want an experience as close as possible to enjoying extra episodes of Doctor Who, in a linear fashion, then you will need to track down a listening order that you are comfortable with. There are many of them floating around the internet, usually with advice on how the novels and comic books fit into the sequence as well. There are some discrepancies between these, but most are valid, and if you are pursuing audios only, there are few differences between them. I would recommend: The Complete Adventures Index at http://www.eyespider.freeserve.co.uk/drwho/compleat.html

This seems to be the most diligently updated of all the Doctor Who chronology websites, and it’s sequence makes a lot of sense. Audio dramas in the lists are highlighted in yellow, so it’s easy to pick them out.

So, there are two major challenges before you can enjoy these additional, and very high quality, episodes. However, I hope I have demonstrate that these are both quite easily overcome, and that it is well worth the effort. What could be better than dozens of extra Doctor Who episodes?

The Thirteen Doctors

This year has seen the introduction of two new incarnations of our favourite Time Lord. Although we still have a lot to learn about them both, we know that one, Peter Capaldi, will play the Doctor’s next regeneration. The other, John Hurt, will purportedly play a missing, previously secret incarnation – most likely the true Ninth Doctor.

This takes our total to thirteen, unlucky for some but a miraculous treat for fans. For the uninitiated, that’s eight classic series Doctors (Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, Baker, Davison, Baker, McCoy and McGann), and five modern era Doctors (Hurt, Eccleston, Tennant, Smith and Capaldi).

Much is made of how regeneration has kept the show fresh, but it has also kept it interesting because,  no matter how much the Doctor changes from one life to the next, he remains recognisably the same being. The past fifty years have shown us thirteen different facets of the same person, each one with their own quirks and with different personality traits brought to the fore. As a result, the Doctor’s psyche has been unveiled and explored perhaps more thoroughly than any other popular fictional character. 

What will Capaldi bring to the role? We probably all have different ideas and different hopes, although I’m seeing a lot of anticipation for a more authoritarian Doctor, a more paternal Doctor, a Doctor who is more mysterious and less trustworthy. The showrunner, Stephen Moffat, has used the following adjectives to describe the next Doctor: ‘fierce’, ‘tricky’, ‘different’ (to Matt Smith), and ‘brilliant’ and  It is easy to see the good things that Capaldi may bring to the role, and very hard to anticipate problems that may arise from him playing the part. But problems there will be, I am sure, as almost every new Doctor has a few teething troubles. I am equally sure that Capaldi can pull through these, so long as we accept them and don’t expect perfection. That would be a very easy mistake to make. Because Capaldi is such a talented and well-respected actor, it is tempting to put him on a pedestal and expect too much from him, which would set him up for a fall.

I have to admit, this is the opposite of my reaction to Matt Smith’s casting. I expected very little from him, as I didn’t think he was suitable for the part at first, for various reasons which I am ashamed to say I shouted about all over the internet and am too embarrassed to repeat. Needles to say, I eat my words. After the usual teething troubles, Matt won me over with his quite brilliantly eccentric interpretation of the character. He is not my ideal type of Doctor, but he is a very good one. With Capaldi, I am simply excited to see how he plays the part, and by the implications of his casting. He seems to have all the qualities of a truly great Doctor but what qualities are they exactly?

We have seen the Doctor as an ill-tempered meddler,  an eccentric wanderer, a scientist secret agent, a madcap friend, a compassionate hero, a volatile genius, a subtle trickster, an elegant gentleman, a cursed pariah, a battle-scarred survivor, a dashing and charming casanova , and a crazy young professor. What qualities define the Doctor? We could say that he is a man of peace, but we would have to dismiss the sometimes violent sixth Doctor, and the genocidal actions of the Time War. We could say he is an altruist but that would ignore the first Doctor’s often pathologically selfish actions. We could define the Doctor as an anti-authoritarian wanderer, except the third Doctor worked with the military forces of U.N.I.T. for many years. We could call him an intellectual, a man who solves problems with ideas not action, but many of the Doctors have been action heroes to some extent. We could say that he is a man of principals, who always lives according to his own rules (however alien they may be) but then what about John Hurt’s Doctor, who did what he did in the name of peace and sanity, but not in the name of the Doctor? 

The Doctor is a man who is indefinable, yet also has a clear identity. He is infinitely adaptable, and infinitely consistent. He is a hero and an antihero, a young man and an old man, a genius and a fool, an altruist and a pragmatist, a bohemian and a traditionalist, a thinker and an action hero, an asexual and a Lothario, a man of peace and a man of war, a planner and an improviser, an alien and a human, detached and empathetic. He is Time’s Champion, The Oncoming Storm, The Traveller from Beyond Time, The Last of the Time Lords, the Time Lord Triumphant, The Raggedy Man, The Professor and, of course, River Song’s ‘sweety’.

The Doctor has worn so many faces and personalities already, and soon we will have the fantastic opportunity to view another facet of this dark wanderer.

Dexter: Season 8, episode 1 review: Death or change?

Warning: Spoilers!

And so, the end is near...

It’s always a little harrowing when a much loved TV series with a reputation for great writing announces an end point. Expectations automatically reach critical mass. We are so often left with open-ended finales due to sudden cancellations or unimaginative, episodic storytelling that doesn’t really require or allow a decent resolution. When a long-running show seems to have a definite end-game planned, the expectation is that the ending will (or at least should) be mind-blowing. Let’s temper this with some cold hard reality, however: The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Lost. Ahem.

So, it’s with some trepidation that I allow myself to get cautiously optimistic about what Dexter might have planned for us in this, its eighth and final year. This s a show that has delivered some truly spectacular drama, but has also tread water to an extent that is far more shocking, immoral and criminal than anything Dexter Morgan himself has done. For years, it seemed like nothing would ever change for Miami Metro PD and the life of our eponymous antihero. Yes, Rita died at the end of the fourth year, but this was an exception rather than the rule, and seemd to have remarkably little impact on the format of the show. Dexter quickly found himself a new love interest, and went on with his old lifestyle: killing someone every other week on average, combating a new major serial killer each year in cat and mouse games that lasted approximately twelve weeks, fooling the large number of law-enforcement officers he continued to surround himself with, dodging out of incredibly incriminating situations at the last minute with ridiculous ease, doing rudimentary soul-searching on various aspects of human emotion, and forming ill-advised friendships or relationships with other killers. 

In the wake of Rita’s death, I wanted to see Dexter come unravelled, see his code and his justifications get pulled apart, see his facade of normality break down, see the real Dexter laid bare to at least some of the people in his life, see what makes Dexter tick. And this happened for all of about one or two episodes, before Dexter got a grip and found the insipid Lumen to help him through his grief and guilt. Now, however, it seems this show is finally given us the goods and gotten over its fear of upsetting the status quo. Debs discovered Dexter’s secret at the end of season 6 and that has shaped everything to happen since. The secret has since forced Debra into committing murder herself – sending her into a self-destructive spiral of drink drugs and boffing jewellery thieves, and tearing Debra and Dexter apart.

It was Dexter’s reaction to this that made Sunday’s season debut so compelling. Dexter was clearly being driven off the deep end, either by Debra’s dangerous lifestyle or, more convincingly, by Debra trying to force him out of her life. Enter Dr Vogler – an expert on sociopaths who seems to know all about Dexter – to give us some much-needed insight into the workings of Dexter’s brain. But this brought up some unexpected and seemingly unresolvable contradictions. Dexter lost control of his anger on several occasion throughout this episode, driving him to shout at his son, road-rage at an inconsiderate driver, and murder Deb’s latest love interest. All this seemingly because he could not cope with his sister’s rejection. But as Dr Vogler pointed out, in this same episode, sociopaths are dissociated from their emotions, making sudden displays of anger uncharacteristic. Is this a glaring oversight in the writing, or is Dexter experiencing things far more profound than rejection and guilt? Is it possible for a sociopath to stop being a sociopath? And what might it mean for someone as angry and damaged as Dexter to get in touch with his emotions? Far from being a cure for his condition, it could lead to him completely losing control.

I for one cannot wait to see how this season plays out, to see the Dexter and Debs dynamic develop further, and to see Dexter’s surely inevitable fall, either by exposure, breakdown or death. The only thing that can spoil this now is the return of Hannah, possibly the only ‘big bad’ since the show’s beginning that should not have been brought back for an encore.

Michael Gove: The Man Who Wants to Steal Childhood

The first of Michael Gove’s education reforms will soon be introduced. ^The traditional six-week school summer holidays will no longer be set by the state, but instead be the remit of individual headmasters. While there is nothing wrong with this shift of authority in itself, Gove’s intentions, based on comments he made earlier this year about the UK’s need to compete with China, are woefully clear. Gove is hoping that headmasters will opt to dramatically shorten school holidays and make children work for longer.

For those of you who missed them, here are Gove’s comments:
  "We've noticed in Hong Kong and Singapore and other East Asian nations that expectations of mathematical knowledge or of scientific knowledge at every stage are more demanding than in this country,
  "In order to reach those levels of achievement a higher level of effort is expected on behalf of students, parents and teachers. School days are longer, school holidays are shorter. The expectation is that to succeed, hard work is at the heart of everything.
  "If you look at the length of the school day in England, the length of the summer holiday … then we are fighting or actually running in this global race in a way that ensures that we start with a significant handicap.”

Gove is probably counting on league table competition and a need to meet targets giving headmasters the incentive they need to reduce school holidays. The government saves face, having never explicitly ordered the reduction of school holidays, and the educators take the blame. It’s all so very Machiavellian, and it says a lot about the character of ‘New Conservatives’, that while everybody else is finally accepting the importance of work-life balance and family interaction, they instead are saying we need to work harder – as hard as the most industrious and work-centric cultures in the world. They are comparing our country’s economic performance to East Asia and using this to justify taking away our children’s free time.

The motivations behind this are plain to see. In fact, Gove isn’t even trying to hide them. Our country is falling behind in the global economy. The solution to this is obviously to take away children’s holidays and make them spend so much time in school that they hardly see their parents. I mean, problem solved automatically, surely, and it’s the lesser of two evils, right? Well, no. And while anybody with an ounce of sanity can see that this wouldn’t solve anything and would make every child in the country miserable for no reason, Michael Gove lives in New Conservative land, where the best option is always the one that spreads the misery as widely as possible in a desperate, ill-conceived attempt to improve the economy.

He says this will make life ‘easier’ (whatever that means) for parents. Presumably, this means removing scheduling conflicts between job shifts and school hours. There are many ways they could achieve this. They could bring in regulations to give employees greater control over their working hours, encourage employers to offer more flexible and varied shift patterns, and encourage the growth of job-share programmes. They could increase minimum wage, thereby driving down working hours. As always, they opted for the approach that penalises the workers, is best for corporations and hurts those who are most innocent and vulnerable. Their true goal is to remove any reasons people may have for not working full time, no matter how justified those reasons are.

The truth is, the Conservatives can see that Britain’s economy is failing and need another scapegoat. They’ve already gotten as much blood as possible out of the stone of unemployment. Now the target is schools and children, the former for not getting better results, the latter for not studying hard enough. What the Conservatives are wilfully ignoring, is that this country is already experiencing a brain drain, and record levels of underemployment and overqualification, because our economy is not catered towards utilizing academic skills. The lesson we should be taking from East Asia is this: our culture is too individualised, too focussed on profit above all else. East Asian companies recognise that what’s good for society is good for the economy, and what’s good for the masses is good for business. They are far more willing to invest in academic and creative pursuits, and in social and technological advances that will benefit society as a whole and lead to innovations that can later be financially exploited. British corporations are focussed on the short term tangible profits. British businesses want drones, service sector workers, and cold callers and PA’s. The British government is not interested in ensuring poor students can afford to stay on in education. Increasing the standards of our schools is not going to change any of that. It will only produce more disenfranchised young people who have academic skills that nobody wants, or which they cannot fully pursue because of our lack of funding for professional qualifications.

This is not China. We have a different work ethic, a different culture, different lifestyle, different culture, different economy. China’s strict work ethic may be very productive and efficient, but it has its obvious drawbacks. Even if increasing school hours and reducing holidays really would help the economy, which I doubt very much, is it really worth the sacrifice? There is more to life than work and money, particularly for children, but I wouldn’t waste any breath trying to get the Conservatives to understand that.

X-Men: 50 years of fighting for a world that fears and hates them.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

The first issue of X-men was published in 1963, cover dated for September (meaning it was released in July – go figure). This month therefore marks the 50^th anniversary of the X-men comics, and therefore 50 years since the creation of these characters and the concept of super-powered mutants fighting for equality. 

The X-men comics are commemorating the past with a time travel saga that brings the original X-men into the present. This story is due to develop into a major Marvel Universe crossover. Outside of the comics, however, it seems like the event will pass with very little fanfare. This month sees the release of The Wolverine in cinemas worldwide, and its coinciding with such a huge landmark could have been a major marketing point, but the X-men’s half-centenary is going unmentioned. Granted, as a solo film, The Wolverine would not be as appropriate a celebration as next year’s X-men: Days of Future Past (another time travel adventure that will bring the present day X-men face-to-face with their past selves).

What’s truly significant about this landmark, besides the five-oh number itself (which is, after all, just a number), is how much the world has changed since the X-men comics began. The issues of tolerance and inequality underpin the X-men comics and movies and grant them an uncanny amount of pathos. In the world of the X-men, mutants experience a lot of prejudice and this allows the ‘mutant problem’ to become a metaphor for anyone who is discriminated against or simply, doesn’t fit in. These issues were having a huge impact on the western world when the X-men were created, with the civil rights movement still gaining momentum, and many groups, especially black people, still struggling for equal rights under the law even in developed nations. In fact, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in which Martin Luther King delivered his legendary “I have a dream speech”, occurred around the same time as the release of the first X-men comic.

In those flower-power days, the struggle for racial equality was the most obvious analogy that could be drawn between the real world and the events of the X-men comics, and the writers often highlighted this. 1974 brought us a multicultural X-men, and a black African woman who would go on to lead the team. Disability was another equality issue that the comics addressed prominently, with Professor Xavier representing one of the world’s first disabled super-heroes. Over the years, as the comics have changed and the society they exist in has changed even more, mutants have been a metaphor for feminism, gay pride, class struggles, religious conflict, as well as any and all ethnic groups. Recently, the metaphor has been extended to encompass all manner of subcultures, lifestyles and political ideologies. 

While the X-men fight for peaceful coexistence, their ever-present opponent, Magneto, shows the more militant approach to the struggle that minorities face – a struggle for acceptance, respect and, often, survival. Our abhorrence of his violent methods is tempered by our understanding and sympathy for his situation, and the knowledge that all his actions are done because he feels they will protect his people. It is this that makes Magneto one of the most well-rounded and complex villains, not just in the super-hero genre, but in popular culture as a whole. In the comics, Magneto has veered in his approach many times, actually turning to the X-men’s cause on several occasions, albeit with a slightly more pragmatic (some would say realistic) outlook on mutant-human relations. Now that the X-men films are finally returning to the present day and showing events after the original X-men trilogy, this would be an interesting route for the films to follow, in the wake of Magneto seeing the terrible consequences of his violent ways in X-men 3: The Last Stand. It would be dramatic gold, to see an older, reformed Magneto confront his extremist past self in Days of Future Past.

It is this kind multi-dimensional, quite realistic portrayal of conflicts that has made the X-men comics far more than the tales of a team of heroes born with super-powers, and allowed them to gain a following that has continually grown for the past 50 years. These issues of tolerance and equality and the struggles that stem from them have – dare I say it – mutated almost beyond recognition since then, with a black US president endorsing same-sex marriage, but greater conflicts emerging in other arenas. It may be incongruous to suggest that the X-men stories contributed to this change in any significant way, however staunchly they championed equality, but it would also be remiss to fail to acknowledge the small part they have played in the sea-change in culture that has helped shape popular opinion and thus allowed ever-growing inclusiveness over the past five decades.