Whispers of Terror by Justin Richards

There’s a danger in writing a homage in any genre that, in celebrating the good things about any particular style or approach, you inadvertently also bring the flaws of that approach along for the ride. Whispers of Terror anchors itself firmly in the style and ethos of Season 22, and while it perhaps succeeds where the televised entries in that season underachieved, it does share some of the weaknesses of its retrospective stablemates. Colin Baker’s Doctor was, for logical reasons, perhaps the one Big Finish felt they could do most with from day one; given an actor who was never really in three years allowed to play the part the way he wanted, and a production team on the verge of creative bankruptcy, it’s understandable that revisiting the Sixth Doctor would be high on the list of creative ambitions. The initial pairing with Nicola Bryant’s Peri is similarly good sense and also ties the story down to a certain stage in the Sixth Doctor’s tenure. Where it starts to become slightly shaky, however, is in its fidelity to the house style of the period.

Justin Richards’s script would have fitted perfectly into Season 22- it’s almost a tribute to the Eric Saward approach to writing Who, with plenty of characters known only by their surnames, bumping each other off in a variety of unpleasant fashions. With a slightly different execution it could have been a work of brilliance- a combined ghost story and political thriller- but there’s little or no attempt to nurture the kind of atmosphere needed to make a ghost story work and if anything, the incidental music is too artificial and works against it. Similarly, the political thriller aspect could have been much more effective if we were led to care about the society in which the story takes place. The character names suggest either Earth or a human colony, but we’re given nothing to confirm or deny that and very little sense of context. What sort of society sets up a Museum of Aural Antiquities (which appears in part to be a thinly veiled archive for electronic surveillance)? How could Visteen Krane become renowned as the greatest actor of his age without committing his image to any visual medium? We’re given no clues, but when the climax of the story depends on Purnell being publicly denounced, this ought to matter.

Having said that, there are several good things about the story. Peter Miles is instantly recognisable, but does give Gantman a certain integrity, while Lisa Bowerman injects her performance with a little more edge so she doesn’t just sound like Benny, however the rest of the supporting cast are unfortunately not so well-defined. The larger the supporting cast, the more different from each other they need to sound, and there are just too many male Home Counties voices here. Richards’s script is self-referential in one or two places (you need to have read his New Adventure Theatre of War to pick up on some of them) and Knapton’s secret is the one nice use of the audio form and Gantmans blindness. The sound creature is mostly a success, although it takes until the sequence with Purnell in the edit suite for its nature to really come across. Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are comfortable settling back into their old roles, and the isolated setting means that the story never sags as such, although it’s also tempting to conjecture that it could have been rather better with a little bit more ambition and a slightly more sympathetic approach. That said, when the resources of the BBC did little better with much of the Sixth Doctor’s televised era, Big Finish can probably feel pleased with a very acceptable stab at recreating Colin Baker’s Doctor in a recognisable context.