I don’t know whether there is any hard line on just how many actual releases there are in this strand of BBC Audio’s Doctor Who output – it’s a talking book range that encompasses all readings of the Target Books era, yes, but may also include extraneous readings such as Paul McGann’s reading of his 1996 film, Frazer Hines’ reading his The Evil of the Daleks novel, Tom Baker’s performing The Pescatons, and Jon Pertwee’s readings of the Peladon stories, Peter Davison’s reading of Kinda, and perhaps even the radio plays that Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen were reunited for in the early 1990s… The parameters are that vague. Nevertheless, the end has finally been reached, and the BBC has announced that the capstone to the entire line is Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster!
On reflection, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster is a perfect book and story to save for last, a very shrewd and appropriate story — and that cover, digitally cleaned, is spectacular. The new/old series logo looks incredible on this release. And the sound design is incredible when you think back to the simplicity of the early releases… For the last bow, the BBC Audio team has made every effort to make this release the very best it can be, and one of the single most memorable of the Target books — as written by Terrance Dicks, and produced on TV by Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes — has been very specifically chosen to be the finale of this veteran publishing range within the BBC. I cannot even say when exactly it started!
Opting for Jon Culshaw to read and perform seems a fine move. With his natural ability to adopt voices and accents, he opts for an upbeat and bubbly reading that, as the story progresses, is very different to the way in which you or I would likely have read and interpreted the book, and it has made me reflect on whether it matters. Put aside the television counterpart, think only of the book, and I do think it significant that so many of the Target/WH Allen books were written by Terrance Dicks, and therefore were filtered through his lens, but, even with this consideration, he is still working off actual scripts from the television series, and so he is still translating material commissioned under very different sensibilities than his own. If it had been Robert Holmes (or even Ian Marter) employed by Target Books instead of Dicks, it would be a novel range filtered through their more mature lens… and so, given the regime the original script was commissioned under, you must ponder, is Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster an audio reading that is faithful purely to the original scriptwriter’s (Robert Banks-Stewart) intention, or has it been perhaps undersold a little by Jon Culshaw’s rather bubbly and down-the-line reading of what is actually still very atmospheric prose and setting being related on the page by Terrance Dicks?
It’s an interesting point to think on. Culshaw is a fine voice artist, but he isn’t an actor. And I believe an experienced actor, such as Geoffrey Beevers or Colin Baker, would have picked up on, and emphasised more of, the various moments of eerieness and tension that are embedded in this story; Dicks’ very evocative description of the Caber’s march out of the rolling morning mists, for example, as he approaches the beach and coldly despatches Jock Munroe, then Harry Sullivan. The scenes in the small hospital as Sarah has her first meeting with a Zygon. The village falling into silence as the Skarasen moves overland. These are just three examples where I felt Culshaw’s lack of variance in his tone of delivery was somewhat undermining the scenes he was supposed to be bringing to life. If it were a more science-fiction setting such as Carnival of Monsters or The Ark in Space, this chirpy style of delivery would be perfectly fine, but for a clearly atmospheric and brooding story like this, or Planet of Evil, Culshaw is not the ideal choice.
That (mild actually) criticism aside, this final release boasts a superb soundscape. The sequences where the Doctor selflessly chooses to take himself off and away onto Tulloch Moor, in order to draw the approaching Skarason away from the village, is easily the most exciting and thrilling action sequence I have ever heard committed to audio — and all thanks to Terrance Dicks’ brilliant pacing and wording going hand in hand with the sound engineers giving these scenes the works; this is all topped off by Culshaw’s catching the rhythm of the writing of these events, and you’re brought right into the action and the terror, as the distant but fast approaching Skarason inexorably homes in and bears down on the defenceless Doctor. The attention to detail, creating the sense of environment of the misty moor, is excellent.
Jon Culshaw does his best Tom Baker delivery where required, switches between pseudo-American and Scottish accents elsewhere, and even goes so far as to read out The Changing Face of Doctor Who primer that started out the actual original book! All this, powered by Terrance Dicks’ trademark gift for creating a sense of place and a building air of danger coming gradually closer.
A wonderful release. The range ends in true style.
