I didn't much like "The Fearmonger" when it first arrived, back in February 2000. Having spent the nineties completing my collection of old TV series episodes via UK Gold and shunning the New Adventures books that I had neither the patience nor the cash to accommodate, Big Finish represented a return to those old school values; a chance to join in again with a series starting from scratch - another chance to re-boot the series in a direction other than the awful cod-political dirge the novels seemed to be adopting. It was perhaps, then, too early for me to embrace an adventure set within the political, fascism-obsessed books, featuring a brooding, smug Doctor Who popped up during live radio broadcasts and written by a New Adventures veteran writer, the like of which I had taken an instant dislike to anyway by virtue of the fact they were getting paid to do my dream job.

Everyone else loved it, and I could never see why. Once again this story reminded me of "Downtime", which didn't help. Vince Henderson's slightly naff DJ recalled John Leeson's turn in that low-budget spin-off, as well as the serious, very New Adventuresy tone that both shared. Sherilyn Harper is a very New Adventures sounding name for a sophisticated lead villainess, the sort of name Big Finish love but which you can't imagine anyone actually being christened with in real life (Gideon Krane anyone?).

A good re-evaluation can change your opinion of something in a major way, however. It wasn't even the protestations of my nearest and dearest that it was "actually quite good" that encouraged me to pull the now-quite-dated looking CD from its resting place after three years; it was simply that I was running out of plays to re-listen to, and it was either that or "Red Dawn". So "The Fearmonger" it was.

As I set off to work one cloudy Monday morning, the thread of rain looming ever large in the dark sky ahead, I listened to "The Fearmonger" and was surprised at just how hard it was to criticise without falling back on the same unfair preconceptions I had cited before. Blum's writing is taught and unpretentious; Aldred and McCoy are remarkably like they were on TV and unlike more recent performances where they play thirty year old teenager and 'for brooding read haven't-read-the-script-before' respectively. And time (and nicotine) has leant the voices of Hugh Walters and Jacqueline Pearce aged, earthy improvements. Oh, and it's heaps better than "Whispers of Terror" too.

There are still problems of course. Blum isn't quite the writer he wants to believe he is (yet), and so we get the occasional slip-up, like our usually non-judgmental Time Lord dismissing Doctor's of the medical profession with a glib "they always think they know it all". Perhaps Blum had a bad personal experience? You can usually rely on the Doctor to mirror what we know in our hearts as truth, just or at least common sense, and one feels the hero we know would be out campaigning for the rights of nurses, rather than arrogantly slamming a life-saving profession! And the sound design is more Capital FM than urban beauty; "kicking" radio jingles and stock traffic and riot backgrounds only steer the story towards, rather than away from, that real-worldly, modern-age New Adventures feel I'd learnt to dislike.

It does boast a great ending though, which almost makes up for any other shortcomings. Unobvious, pretty clever and it makes sense too. Blum is so eager to set this within its non-existent timeframe that he goes as far as making Ace the focus of this finale, developing the Doctor's character naturally from "Survival" and even (and I'm prepared to attribute this to my imagination) setting the theoretical budget of the story somehow in tune with that lost Season 27. But what next? An audio freeze-frame ending with Ace's Time Lord Academy destination frozen on the Doctors lips? "I know, I'll take you to G..."

One struggles to pin all this down as "good" or "bad", yet perhaps what really matters is that I was pleasantly gripped throughout my entire journey in the company of "The Fearmonger". The next morning, the M1 was closed southbound and there were long tailbacks. It was raining, too. My dreary morning was all the poorer for having hungrily finished "The Fearmonger" the day before.

CD Facts

Part 1 - Tracks 1-6

Part 2 - Tracks 7-11

Part 3 - Tracks 1-5

Part 4 - Tracks 6-9