THE SECOND DOCTOR, VOLUME 01

We travel right back to the Sixties with The Second Doctor Volume 01 from the Big Finish range of The Companion Chronicles.  This volume consists of four adventures, approximately one-hour long each, with behind-the-scenes chats.  Each story is, as expected, from the 2nd Doctor’s era of Doctor Who and are directed by Lisa Bowerman.

The first adventure, The Mouthless Dead by John Pritchard, sees the Doctor, together with Jaime, Polly, and Ben, arrive at an isolated railway station in the path of an oncoming train.  The TARDIS is clipped and the Doctor quickly relocates it safely.

The station is a dark and foreboding place, occupied only by a signalman who has stories of accidents and crashes that would frighten the life out of anyone.  They report the incident to him, but the youngsters are not enamoured with his scare stories.  The Doctor wishes to learn more from the signalman, whilst his friends explore the station.

Polly finds a grieving woman in the waiting room, and Ben & Jamie see a shadowy figure lurking in the mouth of the nearby tunnel.

It’s 1920 and this station is on the route of the final journey that The Unknown Solider will take before he reaches his resting place.  As the TARDIS repairs itself, the station is invaded by a mass of ghosts – but are those ghosts ill-fated submariners, soldiers from Jamie’s Highland regiment, or World War I soldiers?  Or are they all three?

When the signalman is killed, it’s left to the Doctor and his friends to solve the mystery, to work out what’s going on, and to prevent the killing from spreading to the rest of the country.

Owing much to the atmosphere of the second televised Sapphire & Steel story (the one set on a railway station with ghostly apparitions and disgruntled dead soldiers), the two-episode The Mouthless Dead is really quite excellent.  The story doesn’t lean heavily on loud explosions and epic action sequences, instead it gives us time to explore the environment with the four regulars.

The writer wisely teams up Jamie and Ben, something the TV series did (although not often enough), whilst also ensuring that Polly is key to the story’s resolution.  The Doctor doesn’t take a big part in the story, but he is there to offer theories and explanations before the end.

The only two original cast members who are still with us for the recording are Frazer Hines (Jamie) and Anneke Wills (Polly).  Unlike the usual format of The Companion Chronicles in which one voice narrates the whole thing like an audiobook with extra music and an occasional second voice, The Mouthless Dead is much more like a full-cast audio.  Hines and Wills take it in turns to be the narrator when their character is most heavily featured, but that’s all that it really shares with traditional The Companion Chronicles offerings.

Frazer Hines doubles as The Second Doctor, a voice he’s taken to with comparative ease by the time of The Second Doctor Volume 01.  Standing in for the late Michael Craze (who sadly died in 1998) is Elliot Chapman.  Ben’s isn’t a voice that we’re hugely familiar with since the character never returned to the TV series, or previous audios, and it would be very easy to just do a caricature cockney voice, but Chapman comes across as an authentic Ben Jackson.  The scenes between Ben & Jamie are a delight and, as soon as Chapman starts calling Polly “Duchess” you’ll forget that he’s not Michael Craze.

The Mouthless Dead is definitely a fine start to this four-adventure box-set.  The next adventure, The Story of Extinction, sees Victoria return with Jamie and the Second Doctor. I ‘m actually quite sad that Ben isn’t still around for the next one.