Review: The Company of Friends

July’s Doctor Who audio drama from Big Finish Productions has sort of been a long time in coming. Ever since the company started releasing its Bernice Summerfield series a decade ago, moving the eponymous character from Doctor Who novels into standalone audio plays, listeners have speculated about other characters from Who spin-off media making the same transition. Now, in The Company of Friends, two more of the Doctor’s companions are brought to life on audio for the first time, along with the aforementioned Benny, and a fourth companion who’s been talked about but never seen.

Thanks to the new structure of the monthly audio series – four mini-seasons of three adventures each – there’s one slot left over in the schedule, which allows this adventure to star Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor, making his mainstream return after being shifted to a parallel range. The Company of Friends is that incarnation’s first exposure to the “4x1” format, in which the play’s four episodes are separate stories rather than parts of one whole, which has been popularised by other Doctors in Circular Time, 100 and Forty-Five.

Company kicks off with Benny’s Story by Lance Parkin, starring the brilliant Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield, book- and audio-based companion of the Seventh Doctor and independent adventurer. Before it begins, however, listeners are faced with a certain controversial rendition of the Doctor Who theme tune, which I’ve talked about at length elsewhere. (Not that that’s going to shut me up this time.) I had hoped to hear David Arnold’s dark, atmospheric version making a return, but instead, the clattering cacophony of the 2008 remix was unleashed upon my unsuspecting eardrums. Ah well.

Once that pain passes, we’re treated to a very good story indeed. My only past experience of Benny comes from having read Human Nature, but Parkin sums up her entire backstory in the first minute and a half (even including a sneaky reference to the “Did they or didn’t they?” scene from his novel The Dying Days, in which Benny and the Eighth Doctor first met) so newcomers will soon be up to speed.

Despite the fact that they’ve never appeared in a scene together before, Bowerman and McGann deftly make their characters seem like old friends, setting Parkin’s lively dialogue alight and making their characters’ friendship instantly real. Benny is brilliantly sarcastic and almost as energetic and enthusiastic as the Doctor, who’s in bouncy childlike mode, thoroughly enjoying himself. Even the exposition-heavy scene where the two leads compare notes is enjoyable, because the actors work so well together that they can compensate any clunkiness in the script.

After two short but agonising bursts of That Music, Fitz’s Story begins. Hustle’s Matt di Angelo stars as Fitz Kreiner – the longest-serving of the Eighth Doctor’s many book-only companions – and introduces a story in which the two time-travellers investigate a company offering protection against alien invasion.

When the casting for The Company of Friends was announced, Matt di Angelo’s name was the biggest surprise, because he’s so different from the mental image of Fitz that the books had given me. Happily, he’s brilliant in the role, giving a slightly different take on the character than I’d perhaps expected, but staying engaging and likeable throughout, even when he’s smarmily overdoing things with the ladies, or delivering slightly camp dialogue. Paul McGann, in a more blokey mode than usual, doesn’t seem to have quite the same rapport with di Angelo as he had with Bowerman, but the characters’ relationship is established just as quickly and adequately as in the previous story. (However, this episode’s highlight is the performance of Fenella Woolgar – previously Agatha Christie in The Unicorn and the Wasp – who plays Alien Defence Incorporated’s rounded Hellan Femor, adroitly misleading the listener.)

Stephen Cole’s script is slighter than Parkin’s, but is moves briskly and is interesting enough. And in case any continuity fans are wondering where Fitz fits (sorry) there are several brief references to Anji to placate the timeline buffs. Ultimately, this story probably appeals more to existing Fitz fans than to newcomers, but is still a solid listen.

When your ears have recovered from another screech of the theme music (we’re hoping that the more we overdo it, the more likely it is that someone at Big Finish will listen), Jemima Rooper stars as Doctor Who Magazine comic strip companion Izzy, in Alan Barnes’ Izzy’s Story.

She. Is. Superb.

My only experience of Izzy is her one-panel appearance in The Flood, so I can’t say whether her portrayal here is accurate, but I can say how bloody brilliant Jemima Rooper is. She won me over with the perfectly-pitched Trainspotting sequence before the opening music – sarcastic, cool, self-assured, and funny – and continued to impress from there.

Of course, Barnes’ script also plays an enormous part in this episode’s success. His pre-credits introduction to Izzy is more natural and successful than any of the others – rather than being taught about the character by having their basic backstory recited, we get all those brilliant insignificant details, which give an ideal glimpse of Izzy as a person rather than a list of previous adventures – and his characterisation of her is excellent throughout. Whereas Benny and Fitz were painted in broad strokes, it’s the irrelevant touches which make Izzy so well-rounded: she interrupts her recitation of a story with a footnote, she enthusiastically lists ming-mongish details about he favourite comic books to the bemusement of the Doctor, and complaining that the TARDIS isn’t more like the Enterprise. In the nicest possible way, Barnes depicts her as a larger-than-life fangirl, and there’s a definite comic-book feel to his story, something the audio plays haven’t achieved since Living Legend.

But best of all, he makes a ridiculous story credible. It’s only afterwards, when making notes for this review, that it dawned on me how insane this episode is, but you don’t notice at the time, because Barnes sells it.

After such brilliance, you’ll probably be caught off-guard when the sanity-melting music bursts in, heralding the start of the final episode: Mary’s Story, by Jonathan Morris. This time, the eponymous companion is real-life writer Mary Shelley, whose adventures with the Eighth Doctor were first referenced back in his first audio play (2001’s Storm Warning) but have never been depicted. Julie Cox plays Mary, bringing the character to life with a portrayal that’s restrained but confident.

Because little is known about her tenure as a companion, Mary’s Story is entirely free from infodumping or backstory; it chronicles her very first encounter with the Doctor, rather than a missing adventure. As such, it has a different feel to the other three episodes, because we see the Doctor/companion relationship blossoming for the first time rather than being shown it fully-formed. This is a nice contrast to the rest of the release, and Morris handles the leads’ interaction well throughout the intelligent, timey-wimey storyline.

Understandably, given that it’s her introductory adventure, Mary dominates this episode. More than any of the other three stories, this one rotates around the companion, and the Doctor takes something of a back seat for chunks of the play. Morris conveys Mary’s skill with words – her description of the TARDIS interior is as perfect a summation as you’ll ever get, I think – and gives her dialogue that’s florid enough for her to seem a product of her time, but straightforward enough that she’s likeable and effective as an identification figure.

Since The Company of Friends is my first exposure to the four-story releases, I haven’t got a point of comparison, but all four tales feel a lot meatier than I’d expected for half-hour episodes. Ultimately, they’re still relatively shallow romps, but there’s a lot going on, and the respective writers keep the pace up, also maintaining the perfect balance between character moments and plot progression.

The CD extras consist of the newest chapter of The Three Companions on Disc Two (complete with a blissful, non-mangled version of the Delia Derbyshire theme music), and the usual interviews with the cast on Disc One. With so many actors involved, not everyone gets much of a chance to contribute, but there’s some interesting stuff here, and sound designer David Darlington’s thoughts on Fitz are perhaps the highlight.

Like any release with this amount of variation, The Company of Friends might be received as a bit of a mixed bag. Individually, though, the four stories are all very strong indeed, and if Company is an experiment in transferring other companions into the audio format, it’s been wholly successful. And if Big Finish every fancy commissioning a whole series of stories with Paul McGann and Jemima Rooper, I might stop banging on about that bloody theme tune…