Nigel Robinson

The Doctor and Susan are settling in to life in England in 1963. Susan just wants to be a typical teenager, going to the coffee shop with friends, listening to Radio Luxembourg, debating the merits of the Beatles and other popular groups. But somehow her and her grandfather’s secret, their unearthly origin, has been revealed, and the community is swept by waves of mob behaviour. Who is hunting Susan and the Doctor, and what do they want? And can Susan and the Doctor persuade the Earth show more inhabitants that they mean no harm?

This was a good story. It was produced by Big Finish and AudioGo, so it has a bit more sound effects and design than a typical audiobook. There is pop music, cafe sounds, and echoing footsteps. Carole Ann Ford naturally excels at bringing back Susan, whom she played on the show, and Tam Williams, who has done other stories with Big Finish, lends support as Susan’s friend Cedric. I did find the story got a bit shouty and overly dramatic at the end (particularly the Doctor repeatedly yelling “NEVER!” to the villain demanding that he and Susan help them with their plot), but as a whole it moved at a fast clip. It also proved an especially timely listen about the dangers of mob mentality and the perniciousness of attitudes toward people perceived as "other". show less

Nostalgia!

I take the point of the previous reviewer here, that these crosswords are neither professional quality nor are they easy or even perhaps reasonable. Bearing in mind this is 1983, so only the first five Doctors have been on screen, many of the clues relate to supporting characters or actions from individual episodes across what was already a 600-episode run!

But it's worth noting that this kind of ephemera served a different purpose in 1983. There are nerds of course who could take show more this on a train ride and complete three puzzles by the time they reached Dover. But for a teenage viewer of the time, they had access to Doctor Who Magazine, with its monthly archive features and interviews; a rip-roaring fandom that was at its height; the Target novelisations, which in many cases were collected by fans and more memorable to them than the episodes, which they may only have seen once if ever; and (albeit nascently) the VHS releases which would start to pour out of the BBC as the decade went on. Struggling over a character could mean looking up your Target book or trying to find the right copy of DWM, or having some that you left blank until you could debate it with your friends. (Indeed, Robinson notes in his introduction that spellings are always taken from the Target books if there is any confusion, which goes to show just how important they were to the mythos of Who at the time.) The book "hit different", as the kids like to say, if you were there in the '80s.

Cute, although not something I'll be struggling to complete! show less

This Fourth Doctor adventure features Romana I and is set in the Antibes in 1929. Life is pretty cushy at their hotel, with plenty of time for painting and socializing, although a string of petty thefts and some ominous predictions by the astrologer Madame Arcana (talk about nominative determinism!) are cause for concern. And then there’s the cave on the beach, which contains more than meets the eye…

This was Robinson’s first script for Big Finish (following some novelizations and show more stand-alone novels for the W.H. Allen and Target ranges), and it’s not bad. I liked the choice of Romana I for a companion, given that she spent so little time on the show, and the setting is a good one. Mary Tamm is a crisp narrator, and the script cleverly reduces the amount of Fourth Doctor impressions she has to do. In a single-person story such as this one, it probably helps to reduce the number of “voices” that need to be done. However, I found the sound mixing made some dialogue hard to follow, especially when characters went into the cave or attended a noisy party. I also found the repeated use of the word “realized” as a dialogue tag distracting.

The audio production also includes a brief interview with Mary Tamm, Nigel Robinson, and director Lisa Bowerman, where everyone says the usual nice things about each other, although I did enjoy Tamm’s thoughts on her experiences at conventions and the fact that her grandson was getting into Doctor Who (and was still coming to terms with the fact that Grandma was on TV and sitting beside him at the same time!). I also giggled at the fact that Nigel Robinson seems to include mucus in a lot of his stories.

This was a light, quick audio read (I finished it in a few days, which is speedy for me and audiobooks), so if that’s what you’re after, it might fit the bill. show less

This Doctor Who adventure features the First Doctor, Vicki, and Steven, who has just joined the crew and can’t quite believe that the TARDIS is a time machine. This story also features the Meddling Monk, who likes to mess up history by bringing items from the future many centuries into the past. The Monk was simultaneously amusing and a pain in the butt, and I couldn’t decide which. Overall, this novelization was fine—a Doctor Who novel is pretty much always good entertainment, but show more there wasn’t much more to it than that. show less