COUNCIL OF WAR

This month’s special price offering from Big Finish, under their monthly The Listeners revisit, sees the return of Sgt Benton in the Doctor Who range The Companion Chronicles entitled Council of War by Simon Barnard and Paul Morris from 2013.

Sgt Benton is almost the forgotten member of U.N.I.T. after the Brigadier, their scientific advisor, Jo Grant, and Captain Mike Yates.  Sometimes seen lurking the background, other times being the comic foil, and some times just there to be admonished for some perceived incompetence by one of his superiors.  From the cheese and wine that he managed to obtain from Jo Grant, only for it to be appropriated by Mike Yates (R.H.I.P.) to being “youthed” back to being a baby, only to be returned at the end of the adventure in his birthday suit.

Despite all of this, Sgt Benton remains a much loved character and one which we know so little about.  Some off-the-cuff remark about him from a latter-day Brigadier appearance did little to fill in the blanks, and the lack of availability of John Levene has meant reprising the role has been difficult to achieve.

Nevertheless, John Levene is back as Sgt Benton, and here we get an adventure featuring this “lost” character of U.N.I.T.

The Companion Chronicles range are a lot like an enhanced audiobook, often used by Big Finish to tell stories during the eras of those Doctors where the title actor is no longer with us.  Council of War begins with “Benton, John Benton” protecting a lady’s honour from an inebriated Santa at a councillors Christmas party.  This aspect of the story is told to us by Margery Phipps, voiced by Sinead Keenan, which increases the anticipation of waiting to hear from Benton – which is what we bought the CD for in the first place.

Benton tells us, via flashback, of a conversation in which the third Doctor had learned of reports of ghosts.  Not based on scientific fact, the Doctor would generally ignore such stories, but the disappearance of a woman causes him to wonder if there isn’t something to these reports.  The Brigadier sends Benton to the location of the missing woman, undercover in the guise of a councillor.  Benton isn’t well-trained in the art of going undercover and it isn’t long before he runs into Margery Phipps.

Thanks to a gadget provided by the Doctor, Benton is able to predict the next appearance of one of these “ghosts” and, when he does so, a space-suited figure appears – targeting Phipps.  As they disappear, Benton leaps into action, grabs onto the arm of the figure, and they all disappear together.  They awake in what appears to be the filing room of the council building and there they find the first missing woman.

They are there because Phipps is to be put on trial for charges she knows nothing about.

Council of War is a two-episode one-hour adventure, with a cliffhanger at the end of part one.  What works well is hearing from Benton as he tells this story and gets involved in the adventure.  John Levene doesn’t have a lot of skill in recreating the voices of the third Doctor or the Brigadier, but he makes them sufficiently different from Benton that it works in that sense.  The female voices are handled by Sinead Keenan who narrates the story from Phipps’ perspective.  This works if you like her voice but I have to admit that I kept anticipating Levene’s return to narration duties.

The story/plot is fairly light, with it initially bearing some similarities to the TV adventure The Time Warrior (a space-suited figure kidnapping people from a different time period), but the trial aspect makes it sufficiently different to hold the interest.

I still have part two to listen to and, whilst I probably wouldn’t recommend this story to be top of your “must buy” list if you’re not a big Benton fan, I’m eager to hear how the story ends and I hope this won’t be the only time we get to hear from the good Sergeant.