RECORDED TIME

As I only seem to have the odd half-hour available to listen to things at present, I started listening to the Big Finish audio adventure Recorded Time and Other Stories.

This is a collection of four single-episode short Doctor Who stories featuring the sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) with Peri (Nicola Bryant).

1. Recorded Time

The first short story, by Catherine Harvey, tells the tale of the Doctor and Peri arriving at the court of Henry VIII during a time in which King Henry is tired of his current wife, Anne Boleyn.  The King is at first happy to see his new fool (the funny man in the brightly coloured clothes), but is even happier when he lays his eyes on Peri.  Could Queen Peri be Anne Boleyn’s successor?

The Doctor discovers that the King has greater plans afoot, of immortality, when he locates the King’s scribe (the Scrivener) who has chanced upon alien technology that’s able to rewrite history.  So it is written…

Recorded Time is an intriguing bite-sized story, ably demonstrating that Doctor Who can tell a story in under thirty minutes.  There’s no grand galaxy-spanning scheme requiring TV-sized CGI budgets and millions of spaceships, or indeed any manic running about.  It’s just a short piece of intrigue.  If anything, it compares well to a tightened version of The King’s Demons (and, indeed, if you were to remove the Master & Kamelion from that story and just have the King doing the scheming, it might almost be identical).

Recorded Time and Other Stories is currently available for £2.99 download (CD is still full priced) for the remainder of this month.