Review: The Beautiful People

It's the turn of Romana, in her second incarnation, to narrate the fourth Companion Chronicles release. The Beautiful People, written by Jonathan Morris, sees the classy Time Lady recounting an adventure of the Fourth Doctor, in which the TARDIS crew visit the Vita Novus health spa in the far future, where an impressive rejuvenating weight-loss therapy may not be as innocent and benevolent as it seems.

Lalla Ward is, once again, fantastic. She slips easily back into her role once again, brilliantly scathing towards and about the Doctor and fellow time traveller K-9. After playing Romana-as-President in other Big Finish audios, her reprisal of the onscreen Romana is an excellent demonstration of how versatile and talented she is. Her impression of Tom Baker is brave, but weak; thankfully, he's off-stage for most of the audio (which is given a fantastic explanation!) allowing Romana to take the lead. She definitely acts the story rather than just reading it, putting passion and zest and cattiness into her dialogue, making this story come to life.

Despite being quite light and fluffy in tone, there's a lot going on here, and the story is exciting and funny. Romana finds herself about to be transformed into a range of beauty products, the Doctor chastises an enemy for being a bit too orange, and a character is sentenced to a treadmill by robots for eating some chocolate cake. The script is full of the whimsy and humour of the Fourth Doctor's later stories, and guest actor Marcia Ashton as Karna sums up these high-camp qualities maginifcently.

Unfortunately, the tale lacks any real suspense - the cliffhangers at the end of the first and third chapters are decent enough, but the story's villain lacks any menace, and what she's doing doesn't seem that bad in comparison to the average Doctor Who plot. The stakes are just about high enough for the listener to care, but not high enough for the attempts at tension and drama to be successful, which is a real shame. Also, there are moments in the third chapter which risk becoming a bit preachy, rather than emotional and uplifiting.

The four releases in this series have been great and, as an experiment, The Companion Chronicles has been wholly successful. The standard of writing and reading has been mostly excellent, and fans of the first four Doctors should love these tales. The Beautiful People in particular is a story that's charming, fun, and generally brilliant.