There are species of sloth faster than me. I really do learn incredibly slowly sometimes. Case in point: the Big Finish Sapphire and Steel audio plays.
These have been a largely hit-and-miss affair, with the distinct emphasis on 'miss'. Yet I've kept on getting them and wasting my time with them. Doh! Still, once in a while, a good one turns up, so I'm not wholly insane.
Where I'm learning impaired is in forgetting to note who writes each story. In particular, if it's producer Nigel Fairs, the Sapphire and Steel supremo at Big Finish, you can pretty much guarantee that the first part of the whole play is going to be absolute drek, with a second part that manages to make the misery you've experienced almost worthwhile.
Turns out that for this, the final play in the series, possibly ever, pretty much the whole of the second part is absolute drek as well. The final ten minutes or so? Now that's where it gets really interesting.
If you've spent enough time reviewing the Big Finish plays as I have, sooner or later you begin to ask yourself the question "What's the point?" To put it bluntly, there's more than a few that have been complete rubbish. There are entire ranges that are almost pure rubbish, such as the Eighth Doctor/Lucie Miller plays and the Sapphire and Steel range. So what's the point in spending time listening to them and reviewing them if all you're going to end up doing is variants on "Oh my God, why?" There are more constructive things to do with your life.
The answer is simple. As well as regularly turning up plays that can be described as not bad, sooner or later, you hit upon ones that can only be described as excellent. And then I get to tell you about them.
It's been a long time coming, but it's finally here: it's the first excellent Big Finish Sapphire and Steel play, Zero. Except it's Gold and Silver who have been assigned this time.
What is it about Big Finish and piers? Every time they want to do somewhere creepy, they send the cast off to a pier to get tormented by comedians and Punch and Judy. Piers are the sandpits of the modern audio horror age, apparently.
This time, though, it's Sapphire and Steel who have been assigned to the sea-front, rather than the usual Doctor Who crowd. In the company of Sam Kelly from 'Allo, 'Allo and plenty of other Big Finish plays (The Holy Terror, Return to the Web Planet), Joannah Tincey and David Horovitch, our heroes, David Warner and Susannah Harker, manage to wend their way through an above-average S&S tale that for once, contains an interesting idea or two.
Big Finish producer Nigel Fairs and co painted themselves into something of a corner with their last Sapphire and Steel audio play. They really thought it was going to be the last one, since the sales figures had been somewhat lacking, so they essentially killed off Sapphire and Steel.
Trouble was, Big Finish supremo Jason Haigh-Ellery decided he wanted more episodes, commissioned a third series of stories and Fairs and co had to come up with a way out for our heroes. Several glasses of red wine later, they came up with the idea of recasting Sapphire and Steel.
So here's Second Sight, answering a question no one had previously asked before and never really wanted an answer to either: what if Sapphire and Steel were played by young Australian soap stars?
'Ang on. Something's a bit fishy here. Big Finish, despite flagging audience figures, is bringing back Sapphire and Steel for a third season of audio plays. Thing is, the first one doesn't star either David Warner or Susannah Harker. Instead, it stars Blair McDonough as Steel and Anna Skellern as Sapphire. And they're Australian - you can tell from the trailer.
No doubt it's an attempt to do something clever, in light of the fact Sapphire and Steel sort of get killed off at the end of the last story. Have Sapphire and Steel been recast to appeal to the overseas market (Australia being more or less the only country that ever showed Sapphire and Steel except the UK)? Do I care, given I never especially liked David Warner or Susannah Harker in the roles?
Trouble is, the Big Finish site sort of ruins the illusion the recasting might be permanent:
And the next story lists DW and SH as S&S, as do the others. Of course, that could be the elaborate double bluff.
Still, it's nice to see Big Finish being experimental, taking chances, playing with formats, etc.
Oh bugger. And they were doing so well. Okay, last week's was a bit arse, although fine as comedy. But this week's was a bit dull really and just a touch silly.
Which is odd, because it was a PJ Hammond script. I remember coming out of last year's PJ Hammond episode wondering how they managed to balls up what should have been a classic and it's happened again.
It's quite funny listening to the documentaries on the end of these Big Finish audio plays. Some guy who sounds almost exactly like Russell T Davies (but isn't) tries to think up questions to ask the actors in the plays. Guest stars repeat like a mantra that their kids will love them for doing it and it's given them much kudos; regulars will trot out - with all the enthusiasm you can imagine someone asked the same question for 25 years can muster - what it means to them.
And of course the directors, producers and writers all proclaim how absolutely super wonderful and lovely it was to work with X, Y and Z and how the latest effort is more or less the best thing written down on paper since cuneiform was first invented.
Peter Davison is always a bit more refreshing and candid when questioned (as anyone who's ever listened to any of his DVD commentaries will know). Did you know, for example, that he almost never reads the script before coming into the Big Finish studios? Or that he'll record three plays in three days?
Still, he can get away with it most of the time. The double-bill of The Mind's Eye and Mission of the Viyrans is really very good - quite old school, clever and strong on characterisation for the regulars. Yes, it's got Owen Teale hamming it up something chronic as an evil scientist and Rebecca Front as one of the most uncommitted baddies in recent history. But they both work pretty well.
There's something about the Big Finish Sapphire and Steel plays. They make you acutely aware of time.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Your life is ebbing away. Tick tock. That's two hours you could have been using for something else. Instead, you're now two hours closer to being dead.
Certainly, for the first half of The Mystery of the Missing Hour, that's how I was feeling (hence the somewhat tardy nature of this review - I wasn't exactly desperate to get through this one). I even reached the point where I was considering pretending to have listened to the whole thing and reviewing it all the same.
It really was that bad. I'd even consider using a word beginning with s.
But I'm glad I'm conscientious enough to have stuck through it. Because disk two is a cracker.
Big Finish (and the writer Joseph Lidster) have essentially taken a huge gamble: that because you've ponied up the cash for the play, you're going to listen to something that is deliberately complete crap and stick through to the end.
Anna wants to know if Sapphire and Steel is worth watching. I've tried to help her out, but feel free to go over and offer your own advice. A little searching on YouTube reveals you can find some of the episodes on there now (mostly unembeddable unfortunately). But this one from the fourth “Assignment” is embeddable and is a fairly good sampler, particularly since PJ Hammond says he's going to use elements from it in his next Torchwood episode.
Just got an email from The Peter Serafinowicz Show's PR.
Episode 1 of The Peter Serafinowicz Show is being premiered on myspace, on the Thursdays are Funny profile page www.myspace.com/bbc2comedy from Monday 1st October. It will be shown online in three parts, but with a few sketches held back so as not to spoil the show on Thursday!
The myspace profile has some Vivienne Vyle clips also as well as a few extra Peter Serafinowicz clips.
So there you go. Tune in to the show online from tomorrow, because it looks more than a little bit promising.
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