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| The Fearmonger by Jonathan Blum |
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Given the
credentials of the McCoy era production team, and its conviction that
there were more Nazis under the bed than Hide and Seek night at the
Eagle’s Nest, if anything it’s surprising to find ‘The Fearmonger’ is,
when it counts, surprisingly moderate. In fact, if anything it stands out
precisely because it’s so tame by comparison with a television series
which felt sufficiently confident to have the main audience identification
figure talking about her Asian friend’s home being firebombed by racists.
There are, as far as we can tell, no black or Asian characters, and only a
couple of tangential references to beatings to show the human consequences
of racism. And by locating the source of the evil in an alien creature
rather than in the rabble-rousing demagogue, the story successfully avoids
having to deal with racism and xenophobia as part of the human condition.
Sherilyn Harper is ultimately shown up as incapable of dealing with the
situation which she creates, even though her motivation is, as far as we
can tell, sincere- it’d be interesting to see her in a Fenric-style
situation where her faith in her own beliefs is tested- but one of the
production’s sly tricks is to make the real Harper an ordinary middle-aged
woman, rather than the scheming and unscrupulous villain one might expect
from a Jacqueline Pearce character. If anything, it’s the stylistic touches
rather than the substance which stand out- the opening of the story
successfully evokes the mature Cartmel-era style by having the Doctor and
Ace established on the trail of the Fearmonger, and the first episode
continues strongly by having the Doctor gradually take over Mick
Thompson’s radio programme in a way which works in audio but wouldn’t work
so well with pictures. Also worthy of mention is the cliffhanger to Part
Two, which nicely builds up a genuine sense of danger while also
emphasising Ace beginning to move down the path towards becoming a
substitute Doctor; the only weakness being the fluid timescale of the
story’s second half, which has Ace running around a few minutes after
being told she’ll be in hospital for weeks because nobody really gave much
thought to cultivating a sense of time passing in the build-up to the
election- surely a missed opportunity in a story which makes such good use
of the Mick Thompson Show as a framing device. But while good production
makes the story an engaging drama, there’s also a sense in which it lacks
the courage and confidence to match what the television episodes with the
regulars had to say on the subject- by no means a bad start, but strangely
pale and tentative given the subject matter and period being evoked.
CD Facts Part 1 - Tracks 1-6 Part 2 - Tracks 7-11 Part 3 - Tracks 1-5 Part 4 - Tracks 6-9
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Continuing
the adventures of the Seventh Doctor and Ace after the events of
‘Survival’ must have been one of the early goals of Big Finish’s business
plan given the general feeling that this particular Doctor-companion
partnership had unfinished business and was never quite given the
opportunity to reach its natural conclusion. The difficulty, of course,
lay with the New Adventures, which took in lifestyles and psychological
states rather too extreme for primetime family television, so the trick
for Big Finish would be to capitalise on the popularity of the McCoy/Aldred
partnership while staking out their own ground in between the established
television adventures and the New Adventures’ territory. In the
circumstances, Jonathan Blum might seem an unusual choice to launch the
Seventh Doctor into audio, particularly given the story’s contemporary
British setting; perhaps best known to some as Mr Kate Orman, those fans
more protective of the series’ "essential Britishness" might have feared
an adventure set in a Britain of red phone boxes, Routemaster buses and
tea at four o’clock. Thankfully the story uses its cosmopolitan roots to
good effect, and although we’re definitely in Britain, the overall
impression is one of the English-speaking world in general rather than a
specific situation.