At the point of death, Professor Bernice Summerfield finds herself plunged into a strange world of – panto!
3 Comments
Octafish
on May 8, 2016 at 12:13 AM
Oh No It Isn’t – Paul Cornell, adapted by Jac Rayner
I think that starting the range with Oh No It Isn’t is a brave move…
Oh! No it isn’t!
Oh! Yes it is!
Okay, I’ll cut it out…
Panto and Carry On humour has the potential to be alienating, I have to admit to being a bit concerned when the panto stuff kicked in but I needn’t have been. The humour may not be sophisticated, but it is genuinely funny. I loved the Grel, with a name like Octafish how could it be otherwise? They’re cosmic squidfaced-librarians who are obsessed with collecting and cataloguing facts. They get mixed up in the panto scenario leading to lots of chasing Benny about through several fairytale scenarios.
Lisa Bowerman is perfect and gets the character immediately. I never doubt for a second that she is Benny. That Wolsey is voiced by Nicholas Courtney is Brigadier-tastic, while Mark Gatiss channels Kenneth Williams in full Carry On mode in his portrayal of the Grand Vizier.
This is a fun, funny play, which unravels the rules of panto and fairytales as it goes.
I have to agree with Octafish and others when they say that starting a new range with a comedy that parodies pantomime is a risky idea. I can take or leave panto but had I hated it, having it as the theme of this play might have put me off.
It seems even crazier in retrospect because it was on the strength of the Benny range that BF secured permission to do Doctor Who, which must have been on their minds when they started. Then when they did get permission to do Doctor Who they did the same thing again, and started with a confusing story that was more likely to alienate newcomers than appeal to them.
One could be forgiven for wondering what on earth they thought they were doing – did they really want to shoot themselves in the foot and narrow their audience before they had even begun?
Furthermore, considering that both the Benny and the Doctor Who ranges had ultra traditional second stories, Beyond the Sun and Phantasmagoria respectively, wouldn’t it have been better to start with those and gradually get more complex and esoteric? Whilst part of the appeal of audios is that they can go into more depth and be more experimental than other media such as TV, even those fans who welcome that depth and experimentation feel they should have started with something more straightforward.
However, the first few Benny plays are essentially versions of the books, and this was the first story in the Virgin New Adventures range. Therefore, whilst risky to begin with, it is at least faithful to the Benny timeline and a more reasonable place to start than it seems.
So. Having started the Benny range with a parody of panto, is it any good? Well, yes. It is. It’s great.
A friend of mine once said to me that upon hearing this play he got the impression that Bernice Summerfield, for all that she is an academic and a professor of archaeology, comes across as a bit shallow. This is fair comment, at least at first, as she ogles the male students and appears flippant and frivolous. It’s not long, though, before disaster hits and Benny takes charge, showing more of the mettle we would expect from someone who not only travelled with the Doctor but who impressed him so much he gave her a Time Ring as a wedding present. Not something we’d expect our favourite time lord to do on a whim.
It feels like a bit of a rush, from “flippant Benny” to “take charge Benny” in such a short time, but the play flows very well and sweeps you along with it as events unfold into madness, mayhem and, of course, panto.
As if escaping from a virtual panto world wasn’t enough, Benny is being pursued by the Grel. A squid faced race of Data Pirates, obsessed with the gathering of facts, the Grel are hilarious as they hunt Benny and her friends and it’s easy to forget that they are a genuine threat; perfectly prepared to invade planets, destroy ships in space and even kidnap people in their quest for knowledge. Their desire to acquire facts and keep them from others makes them anathema to Benny, and anyone else who believes knowledge should be freely available.
As Benny gets sucked into the “story”, the play sets a theme that will appear throughout the range – that stories have a life of their own, and bend others to their desire to be told. There are echoes of Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters here, which also explores this theme, that stories exist independently of the people in them, are some kind of entity in their own right, will bend their players to their will, and can be directed easier than they can be changed. It also works as an allegory for time travel. The web of time can be thought of as the version of the story of the universe, perhaps all universes, that must be told.
Special mention should be made of Nicholas Courtney who plays Benny’s cat and is clearly having a great time with more innuendos than a Carry On film. Speaking of which, Mark Gatiss as the Grand Vizier is a scream, stealing the show for me as he channels Kenneth Williams, and there are strong showings from the rest of the cast too. When the cast is clearly having so much fun with a story, it seems rude not to join in.
Apart from the threat of the Grel there is another, the Perfectons, whose missile has caused the panto world to be created and the crew of Benny’s ship to be trapped in it. The ending, after all the frivolity, is actually very serious as Benny has a judgement call to make – to allow the Perfectons to live again means that she, and everyone else, will be enslaved by them. At the end of it we see the world-weariness which will become a feature of her character later in the series.
Having seen what happens to Benny later I can look back fondly on this play as a bit of fun before things start getting serious for her. How she will be callously manipulated and sold down the river by those she trusts the most. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That is for future reviews.
Lisa Bowerman is a perfect choice for the part. She’s very versatile, switching from funny to serious to haggard with ease. It’s very refreshing to see such a well rounded female character, especially a female lead, and Lisa clearly relishes the part. It’s also a testament to how good she is in the part that having heard her, I can’t now imagine anyone else doing it. Even Paul Cornell, creator of the character, says he hears her voice in his head when he writes for Benny. High praise indeed, and well deserved.
Great fun and an interesting, if totally mad, start to the range.
Paul Cornell’s introductory novel for the original Bernice Summerfield solo adventures is also the first Big Finish production. This is the first audio of its kind, adapted by Jac Rayner who streamlines the story into one, fantastic, pantomime adventure. This audio is a delight from start to finish, despite the drama deliberately undermiming itself every step of the way with a tongue in cheek wink at the audience. This is not a recipe for a successful series but on this one occasion the story manages to hold up as a whole, largely due to exemplary performances from the cast and wonderful a sound design that gives the play a deliberately creaky floorboard feel.
Lisa Bowerman’s voice seems a natural fit for Bernice, and although this is her first foray into the part she succeeds admirably. She is overshadowed somewhat though by the presence of Nicholas Courtney playing his strangest role to date, a talking cat. He clearly seems to enjoy the role, his voice perfectly suited to drawing Bernice, and the listeners, into a roaring adventure around the magical fairytale land. He also brings a natural gravitas that is essential for one of the plays rare, sombre moments, when Wolsley discovers his true secret identity.
The rest of the cast fit together well, with Mark Gatiss as the grand vizier deliberately throwing in an over the top ‘boo hiss’ performance as a scheming vizier. Added to the mix are a larger than life genie, an old exhausted king, several ‘dwarves’, a ladylike dame and several tongue in cheek Grell. No performance stands out as being below par, and all stand scrutiny under the warm panto-lights glare.
Perhaps the weakest area of the play is its beginning. It takes a few minutes to get into the spirit of adventure, but the scenes leading into the Grell attack on the ship seem slightly strange. As this is presumed to be the listeners first glimpse of Bernice, showing her nearly reluctantly seducing a student is not perhaps the best first impression. Fortunately the pace picks up once the topic of exploding stars and cross dressing are raised.
All in all Oh No It Isn’t is something that Big Finish obviously put a lot of time and effort into. A grand cast is assembled for a production every bit as bold and epic as it deserves to be. The only gripe I have is that although this is a standout play in its own right it does not set the best example for a series. It is a story where the majority of the cast suffer multiple identity criseses (including the titular character) for the majority of the play, a main character who almost accidentally seduces a student and a villain just as ridiculous as pantomime demand. Although this is fantastic we should all be glad it remains unique, and that although the series has continued it quickly changed its tone to something much more mature.
Oh No It Isn’t – Paul Cornell, adapted by Jac Rayner
I think that starting the range with Oh No It Isn’t is a brave move…
Oh! No it isn’t!
Oh! Yes it is!
Okay, I’ll cut it out…
Panto and Carry On humour has the potential to be alienating, I have to admit to being a bit concerned when the panto stuff kicked in but I needn’t have been. The humour may not be sophisticated, but it is genuinely funny. I loved the Grel, with a name like Octafish how could it be otherwise? They’re cosmic squidfaced-librarians who are obsessed with collecting and cataloguing facts. They get mixed up in the panto scenario leading to lots of chasing Benny about through several fairytale scenarios.
Lisa Bowerman is perfect and gets the character immediately. I never doubt for a second that she is Benny. That Wolsey is voiced by Nicholas Courtney is Brigadier-tastic, while Mark Gatiss channels Kenneth Williams in full Carry On mode in his portrayal of the Grand Vizier.
This is a fun, funny play, which unravels the rules of panto and fairytales as it goes.
Oh No It Isn’t
“The King’s balls get bigger every year!”
I have to agree with Octafish and others when they say that starting a new range with a comedy that parodies pantomime is a risky idea. I can take or leave panto but had I hated it, having it as the theme of this play might have put me off.
It seems even crazier in retrospect because it was on the strength of the Benny range that BF secured permission to do Doctor Who, which must have been on their minds when they started. Then when they did get permission to do Doctor Who they did the same thing again, and started with a confusing story that was more likely to alienate newcomers than appeal to them.
One could be forgiven for wondering what on earth they thought they were doing – did they really want to shoot themselves in the foot and narrow their audience before they had even begun?
Furthermore, considering that both the Benny and the Doctor Who ranges had ultra traditional second stories, Beyond the Sun and Phantasmagoria respectively, wouldn’t it have been better to start with those and gradually get more complex and esoteric? Whilst part of the appeal of audios is that they can go into more depth and be more experimental than other media such as TV, even those fans who welcome that depth and experimentation feel they should have started with something more straightforward.
However, the first few Benny plays are essentially versions of the books, and this was the first story in the Virgin New Adventures range. Therefore, whilst risky to begin with, it is at least faithful to the Benny timeline and a more reasonable place to start than it seems.
So. Having started the Benny range with a parody of panto, is it any good? Well, yes. It is. It’s great.
A friend of mine once said to me that upon hearing this play he got the impression that Bernice Summerfield, for all that she is an academic and a professor of archaeology, comes across as a bit shallow. This is fair comment, at least at first, as she ogles the male students and appears flippant and frivolous. It’s not long, though, before disaster hits and Benny takes charge, showing more of the mettle we would expect from someone who not only travelled with the Doctor but who impressed him so much he gave her a Time Ring as a wedding present. Not something we’d expect our favourite time lord to do on a whim.
It feels like a bit of a rush, from “flippant Benny” to “take charge Benny” in such a short time, but the play flows very well and sweeps you along with it as events unfold into madness, mayhem and, of course, panto.
As if escaping from a virtual panto world wasn’t enough, Benny is being pursued by the Grel. A squid faced race of Data Pirates, obsessed with the gathering of facts, the Grel are hilarious as they hunt Benny and her friends and it’s easy to forget that they are a genuine threat; perfectly prepared to invade planets, destroy ships in space and even kidnap people in their quest for knowledge. Their desire to acquire facts and keep them from others makes them anathema to Benny, and anyone else who believes knowledge should be freely available.
As Benny gets sucked into the “story”, the play sets a theme that will appear throughout the range – that stories have a life of their own, and bend others to their desire to be told. There are echoes of Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters here, which also explores this theme, that stories exist independently of the people in them, are some kind of entity in their own right, will bend their players to their will, and can be directed easier than they can be changed. It also works as an allegory for time travel. The web of time can be thought of as the version of the story of the universe, perhaps all universes, that must be told.
Special mention should be made of Nicholas Courtney who plays Benny’s cat and is clearly having a great time with more innuendos than a Carry On film. Speaking of which, Mark Gatiss as the Grand Vizier is a scream, stealing the show for me as he channels Kenneth Williams, and there are strong showings from the rest of the cast too. When the cast is clearly having so much fun with a story, it seems rude not to join in.
Apart from the threat of the Grel there is another, the Perfectons, whose missile has caused the panto world to be created and the crew of Benny’s ship to be trapped in it. The ending, after all the frivolity, is actually very serious as Benny has a judgement call to make – to allow the Perfectons to live again means that she, and everyone else, will be enslaved by them. At the end of it we see the world-weariness which will become a feature of her character later in the series.
Having seen what happens to Benny later I can look back fondly on this play as a bit of fun before things start getting serious for her. How she will be callously manipulated and sold down the river by those she trusts the most. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That is for future reviews.
Lisa Bowerman is a perfect choice for the part. She’s very versatile, switching from funny to serious to haggard with ease. It’s very refreshing to see such a well rounded female character, especially a female lead, and Lisa clearly relishes the part. It’s also a testament to how good she is in the part that having heard her, I can’t now imagine anyone else doing it. Even Paul Cornell, creator of the character, says he hears her voice in his head when he writes for Benny. High praise indeed, and well deserved.
Great fun and an interesting, if totally mad, start to the range.
9/10.
“Oh No It Isn’t”
Paul Cornell’s introductory novel for the original Bernice Summerfield solo adventures is also the first Big Finish production. This is the first audio of its kind, adapted by Jac Rayner who streamlines the story into one, fantastic, pantomime adventure. This audio is a delight from start to finish, despite the drama deliberately undermiming itself every step of the way with a tongue in cheek wink at the audience. This is not a recipe for a successful series but on this one occasion the story manages to hold up as a whole, largely due to exemplary performances from the cast and wonderful a sound design that gives the play a deliberately creaky floorboard feel.
Lisa Bowerman’s voice seems a natural fit for Bernice, and although this is her first foray into the part she succeeds admirably. She is overshadowed somewhat though by the presence of Nicholas Courtney playing his strangest role to date, a talking cat. He clearly seems to enjoy the role, his voice perfectly suited to drawing Bernice, and the listeners, into a roaring adventure around the magical fairytale land. He also brings a natural gravitas that is essential for one of the plays rare, sombre moments, when Wolsley discovers his true secret identity.
The rest of the cast fit together well, with Mark Gatiss as the grand vizier deliberately throwing in an over the top ‘boo hiss’ performance as a scheming vizier. Added to the mix are a larger than life genie, an old exhausted king, several ‘dwarves’, a ladylike dame and several tongue in cheek Grell. No performance stands out as being below par, and all stand scrutiny under the warm panto-lights glare.
Perhaps the weakest area of the play is its beginning. It takes a few minutes to get into the spirit of adventure, but the scenes leading into the Grell attack on the ship seem slightly strange. As this is presumed to be the listeners first glimpse of Bernice, showing her nearly reluctantly seducing a student is not perhaps the best first impression. Fortunately the pace picks up once the topic of exploding stars and cross dressing are raised.
All in all Oh No It Isn’t is something that Big Finish obviously put a lot of time and effort into. A grand cast is assembled for a production every bit as bold and epic as it deserves to be. The only gripe I have is that although this is a standout play in its own right it does not set the best example for a series. It is a story where the majority of the cast suffer multiple identity criseses (including the titular character) for the majority of the play, a main character who almost accidentally seduces a student and a villain just as ridiculous as pantomime demand. Although this is fantastic we should all be glad it remains unique, and that although the series has continued it quickly changed its tone to something much more mature.
9 / 10