Katharine Armitage

Audio Review: Star Cops – The High Frontier 2

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Ian McArdell

Star Cops is now, unbelievably, three series into its audio revival – not too shabby for a show which only managed one television run during the summer of 1987. 

Winning a small but devoted fanbase, the show sprang from the mind of the late Doctor Who scribe and Blake’s 7 script editor Chris Boucher. He transplanted a police procedural to space, some thirty years in the future, providing clever detective stories with a sci-fi twist. No aliens, just humanity with all its foibles and failings. As the show’s lead Commander Nathan Spring is told in the series’ opener “Spacemen are ten-a-penny. What they need out there is a good copper.”full (3)

The High Frontier storyline comes to its conclusion in this box set with a trio from the show’s original television cast, David Calder (Nathan Spring), Trevor Cooper (Colin Devis) and Linda Newton (Pal Kenzy), alongside Phillip Olivier’s Paul Bailey who was created for audio. Together, the team are on the trail of an insidious organised crime gang known as The Collective, but they soon learn that their enemies are prepared to strike very close to home to thwart the investigation.
Continue reading →

Review: The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Pioneers

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Jacob Licklider

I ask, dear reader, to indulge me a moment before we get into this review proper for just a moment with a few pieces of context for this review.  First and foremost, I am of the firm belief that the first series of Ninth Doctor Adventures should have ended as subtly implied with the Ninth Doctor going into the events of the television story Rose and the beginning of those adventures.  Second, I am also of the belief that the Ninth Doctor especially is a character who works best when there is a companion or companion figure to be attached too.  Finally, the third story of this set deals with the historical establishment of football leagues and I am an American, so take any of my takes on the history of that third episode with the largest pinch of salt you possibly can.  Pioneers opens the third series of Ninth Doctor Adventures from Big Finish Productions and marks the first set in this range to not be released on vinyl as well as CD and download.  This marks a very important shift for the style of these three episodes, mainly because they are not bound by the vinyl format of strictly being 45 minutes in total due to technical limitations, so these three episodes are expanded to an hour.  While I personally prefer my Doctor Who stories to be generally longer than that, this jump in runtime really helps this set feel like each episode is expanded just enough to provide greater depth than previous releases had allowed.

Continue reading →

Audio Review: The Worlds of Blake’s 7 – Bayban the Butcher

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Ian McArdell

Bayban the Butcher grants Colin Baker’s famously off-the-hook villain centre stage. Although best known for playing the colourful Sixth Doctor, he gave an entertainingly big guest performance years earlier in Blake’s 7; Bayban, a self-aggrandising baddie with a penchant for alliteration, came up against Vila in Series C’s City at the Edge of the World.

This self-titled boxset follows an appearance in the recent Avalon series and there’s an audiobook origin story, Bayban Ascending, due in February too. While Bayban apparently died at the end of his only onscreen appearance, it seems you can’t keep a good berserker down. Continue reading →

Audio Review: Survivors – New Dawn 1

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Ian McArdell

New Dawn 1 is the first of two 3-story boxsets which picks up the tale some fifteen years after we last heard from Terry Nation’s Survivors.
Although it eschews a move into double figures, making a fresh start with the subtitle New Dawn, this is effectively the tenth audio series. With six new episodes adding to the thirty-six already released, there’s now more Survivors on audio than were made for television in the mid-1970s, which is a remarkable achievement. However, it’s not the Seventies that we are concerned with here; though it’s not specified, by my reckoning the events of New Dawn occur somewhere in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Abby Grant returns: Fifteen years after she went into hiding, having prized her conflicted teenage son Peter from the clutches of the quasi-military operation he’d become a part of, and despite his crimes, the pair fled.

Continue reading →