Scratchman

Contains spoilers.

Scratchman was written by Tom Baker. The audiobook is read by him, and as the great majority of the story is told by the Doctor in the first person, there is nobody more suited to do so in the whole universe.

It is so wonderful to hear Tom Baker read the story, and so easy to imagine his Doctor (as he was on TV in the 1970s) acting out the part as described - especially the many occasions when the Doctor is described as smiling or grinning broadly. Just as he proved when he returned for his cameo in Day of the Doctor, Tom will always be able to return to be the Doctor whenever he chooses to. Here he even manages to recapture the style of his early period, circa seasons 12-13, although the humour on display is occasionally more reminiscent of a later era, perhaps seasons 16 or 17 when Douglas Adams wrote for the series.

Appropriately enough for something evoking the early Tom Baker era, the Doctor's Companions are Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan. While he doesn't exactly do impressions of them, Tom manages to capture their mannerisms perfectly - Harry is characterised broadly, but then he was drawn like that on TV too! In many ways the best thing about this story is the portrayal of and interplay between the three heroes, which keeps it always terrific fun.

The basic plot is obviously based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. After a first act where the Doctor, Sarah Jane and Harry save the Earth from a genetically engineered virus that converts mannys into "scarecrow"-like proto-cybermannys, Harry and Sarah Jane are infected and taken away to another dimension that is the home of an alien called "Scratchman" who claims to be the devil.

The Doctor goes after them in the TARDIS to rescue them and defeat Scratchman, who wants to take over the universe in order to nom it, as he has nearly finished noming his own dimension. Scratchman forces the three of them to play deadly games, which has some similarity to The Celestial Toymaker. Scratchman does this because he gets noms from their emotions, especially fear. He wants to know what the Doctor is afraid of, but the Doctor resists him, and eventually turns the tables on Scratchman.

There is also a framing device where the Time Lords have put the Doctor on trial for his life for interfering, but, despite this having been done before, it works here because it is simply an excuse for the Doctor to tell the main story from his point of view, and so you can, if you like, imagine the Doctor as an unreliable narrator telling a shaggy doge story. And, because it's Tom doing it, this only adds to the fun.

Unusually for an audiobook in my experience, Tom plays all the parts bar one - the Cyberleader is voiced by Nicholas Briggs, with the same voice he uses to play them in the new series on TV. It's a pity that they couldn't have made him sound like the Cyberleader from Revenge of the Cybermannys, to help complete the season 12 feeling. There are a few other moments where the influence of the new series makes itself felt, such as referring to the TARDIS as a "blue box" instead of a "police box," or emphasising the Doctor's role as saviour of the universe rather than someone who gets involved in most of his adventures by mistaik. None of these would be bad in isolation, but the presence of the new series Cybervoices calls attention to them. I can only assume that Tom is a fan, or else his editor is.

The only serious strike against Scratchman is the length. Maybe it is not so noticeable if you are reading the book yourself, but as an audiobook it is 8 hours and 40 minutes long, over 8 CDs, which makes it about 2 hours longer than Trial of a Time Lord. If this had been a TV story or even a Big Finish audio play instead of a novel, it would be considered to be the most padded story of all time - even more so than Frontier in Space! Then again, padding is only really padding when it is boring, and it is such fun to be in Tom's company here that it is hard to hold this against the story, although it may make it harder to revisit the story in the future because of the time commitment listening to it takes up.

I must also conclude that the padding out of the plot to full novel length has taken the story of Scratchman away from its origins as a Doctor Who film script, presumably intended to be about 2 hours long or roughly the same duration as a four-part TV story. Supposedly it was first cooked up as a film idea by Tom Baker and Ian Marter in the 1970s, and they wanted Vincent Price to play Scratchman (which would have been great). I remember reading about this many years ago, probably in Doctor Who Magazine, and somebody had even gone to the trouble of mocking up a film poster to go with it.

The 1970s origins are clear from the setting of the first act, a remote Scottish island where there are no signs of modern technology such as mobile 'phones or internets (which allows the island to be more easily isolated), and where pinball is considered to be a radical new fad among young people by Harry and Sarah Jane. To a modern audience, this setting may as well be as remote as the historical eras that Jamie and Victoria came from.

I recommend reading or listening to this - and listen to it, if you can. We're lucky to have Tom Baker, there really is nobody else like him.

The Plane Makers, Season Three

It may date from 1964 but this is a spoiler warning.

The third and final season of The Plane Makers completes the bridge to The Power Game that followed it. This season involves a lot more intrigue at the level of government - there are no more plots about the 'ordinary' employees of Scott Furlong Ltd, nor their unions, instead it focuses in entirely on the top level of management represented by our antihero John Wilder.

New characters join in on the ongoing struggle for control of Scott Furlong between Managing Director John Wilder and his arch-rival, Chairmanny Sir Gordon Revidge. First among these is David Corbett, played by Alan "War & Peace" Dobie - he is Wilder's new deputy after Scott Furlong takes over his company to get at their military aircraft contracts. Corbett wants Wilder's job - he is a brilliant engineer, very clever and a fast learner, but inexperienced at politics compared to Wilder. Wilder can't get rid of him though, because Corbett's engineering knowledge is indispensable to the military contracts, so the two mannys are stuck with one another.

James Cameron-Grant MP is played by Peter Jeffrey, one of those actors who was in many things, but is probably best known as Count Grendel from Androids of Tara. Cameron-Grant is a young MP (in contrast to Sir Gerald Merle MP, Wilder's old rival from the previous season) and he is ambitious, showing far more interest in his advertising company and arranging himself seats on company boards than in being an MP, which for him is only a stepping-stone to let him achieve his real goals. Although such things were doubtless just as common back in the '60s, this makes him seem like a very modern MP.
Cameron-Grant acts as Wilder's (and our) way in to the Houses of Parliament, ostensibly employed for his advertising firm to do Scott Furlong's Public Relations, he is really brought on board for his connections.

Laura Challis W-words for Sir Gordon Revidge while being sort-of engaged to Cameron-Grant. She is quickly shown to be easily the intellectual equal of either of them but, as would later be the case with Susan Weldon in The Power Game, can only hold a subordinate position due to the nature of the times.
Miss Challis is the main female character of the season, with a complicated relationship to both Wilder and her supposed fiancé, and this means that Pamela Wilder is sidelined - perhaps this was because they got in a new actress, Ann Firbank, who is simply not as good as Barbara Murray was, playing Pamela as more of a stereotype of a jealous wife, while Murray's superior acting always hinted at suppressed emotions and hidden depths.

Every main character is out for themselves, allying with others only temporarily and when serving their own best interests. These alliances shift from episode to episode, with the only constant being Don Henderson's unwavering loyalty to Wilder (not a character trait he started out with, but one that was well-established by the beginning of this season), and there are enough permutations to keep things interesting through the variety of different power plays we see over the course of this season.

The introduction of new characters inevitably means less time for some of the old ones. As well as sidelining Pamela, we see less of Captain Forbes (Robert Urquhart) although he remains present up to the end. Arthur Sugden (Reginald Marsh) is not so fortunate, being written out at the end of one of the best episodes, It’s A Free Country - Isn’t It? With Scott Furlong taking on military contracts from the government, the staff have to undergo clearance checks by the security services and Sugden, with his humble background and links to the unions, is the victim of the security manny's blatant prejudice. Only John Wilder stands by him but, even with his network of contacts in high places, nobody is willing to stick their neck out by going up against the implacable forces of the Secret Service (a theme that would be revisited in the last season of The Power Game). Their decision is final, and Wilder is forced to get rid of Sugden under the cover of early retirement. Given how much of a focus Sugden was in the previous season, seeing him go under these circumstances is heartbreaking, and makes this a powerful episode. (It helps that the security manny makes himself easy to hate by acting like a right cunt.)

As well as featuring the inferior version of Pamela Wilder (Ann Firbank is sort of the Brian Croucher to Barbara Murray's Stephen Greif), the other main way in which this series fails to be as good as The Power Game is the repeated offence of having important characters sometimes appearing in episodes only over the telephone - in other words the actors are not present at all - including main character John Wilder himself, who misses five episodes in this way! At least when this happened in season two it had the excuse of that being a massive 28 parts long and with many of them being side stories about one-off characters, as opposed to here when it is only 13 parts and forming a continuous story arc.

Speaking of the story arc, well... Corbett, Sir Gordon and the others make several attempts, but in the end Wilder is brought down not by any of his enemies but by a mistaik he himself made, a wrong decision (only with hindsight) that anyone in his position could have taken. Corbett then makes a mistaik of his own by gloating, and so giving Wilder the time he needs to make the best of his position - knowing he must inevitably resign, he does so on his own terms, saving the government minister in charge of the contracts from embarrassment (and having to resign himself, like failing ministers used to in ye olde times of the 1960s, unlike what happens today), and with a knighthood and a seat on the board of Sir Gordon Revidge's merchant bank as his price for so doing - the latter only to rub it in Sir Gordon's face that he didn't win.
Yet it is from Wilder's seat on this board that he learns about the situation at Bligh's company in the first episode of The Power Game, just as though the writers were already setting up the sequel series as this one comes to an end.

And with that, we have come full circle...