Bernice Summerfield

SERIES PLACEMENT

THIS SERIES TAKES
PLACE BETWEEN BERNICE
SUMMERFIELD SERIES 4

AND 6.

WRITTEN BY

JACQUELINE RAYNER (1),

SIMON FORWARD (2),

STEPHEN COLE (3),

STEWART

SHEARGOLD (4) &

COLIN BRAKE (5)

DIRECTED BY

GARY RUSSELL (1, 5),

EDWARD SALT (2, 3)

& JOHN AINSWORTH (4)

RECOMMENDED

PURCHASES

BIG FINISH BERNICE

SUMMERFIELD CDS#5.1 -

5.4 (ISBNS 1-84435-041

-X, 1-84435-073-8, 1-84

35-074-6 & 1-84435-

075-4) RELEASED

BETWEEN JULY 2004

AND MARCH 2005.

| | | | | | | |

PREVIOUS NEXT

Series Five

JULY 2004 - MARCH 2005

1. THE GREL ESCAPE 2. THE BONE OF CONTENTION

3. THE RELICS OF JEGG-SAU 4. THE MASQUERADE OF DEATH

5. SILVER LINING

The Grel Escape

"Proud fact: my people will master time travel.

Sad and ashamed fact: they will use it to steal Peter…"

Fact: Several months after season 4 came to a close with Death and the Daleks,

Season 5 of the Bernice Summerfield range got off to a good start with Jacqueline Rayner's Grel Escape. The title alone announces the return of the Grel and, surprisingly enough, the story is an homage to the 1965 first Doctor serial The Chase. Unfortunately, the main problem with this release is lack of originality. However, the comedic feel together with

some elements Rayner uses from the original serial just about makes up for it.

The first and obvious clear indication of how similar The Grel Escape is going to be to The Chase comes when the displaced television signals of 20th century children's programmes (which Jason has been using to tempt Peter back into the past) give way to a group of Grel in the future who plan to use their newly constructed time machine to travel back to the Braxiatel Collection to snatch Benny's son and study his unique condition in the hope of finding new facts! Thus, Benny, Peter, Jason, Joseph the Porter and Peter's visiting Grel godmother Sophia (who makes her audio debut here after first featuring in The Glass Prison) get caught up in the Time Ring field finding themselves pursued across time and space by the fact-obsessed Grel who are all too determined to get their hands on Peter's brain…

Both Lisa Bowerman and Stephen Fewell shift adeptly between comedy, high farce, action, emotional honesty and sparkling banter allowing this series to really trounce its Big Finish stablemates. Above all they are engaging and entertaining company, this story just whizzing along. Dan Hogarth provides not only a diverse range of accents for the Grel, keeping the Big Finish tradition of regional voiced monsters alive and well, but he also successfully voices most of the incidental characters. As for Julia Houghton's Sophia (from The Glass Prison) she seems more well-adjusted than the pursuing Grel, particularly since Houghton's soft voice contrasts the harshness of the other Grel; the occasional manic outburst shows she's just as obsessed as the rest of them in the pursuit of facts but the success of her appearance is rooted in the way she interacts with the human characters. Sophia's classic deadpan reaction to Jason's cry of "Up yours, squid for brains!" to the chasing Grel is sublime.

All in all this is a perfectly cooked soufflé of a play, with all the regulars on top form as season five gets off to a good, light-hearted start.

The Bone of Contention

The second story for Season 5, The Bone of Contention, comes from writer Simon A Forward . Many listeners will remember Forward's previous tales in Big Finish’s main

Doctor Who range - The Sandman (featuring the sixth Doctor & Evelyn) and Dreamtime (featuring the seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex) which are most notable for the inclusion of a fascinating species known as the Galyari. This release is more or less a prequel to The Sandman.

With the Clutch and their rich back story the Galyari are one of the few species created by Big Finish that truly deserved a return appearance. So who better to stumble across their fleet in the pursuit of a piece of cultural heritage but the eminent Professor Summerfield, desperate for a bit of peace from her hectic life on the Braxiatel collection? Despite the events of the previous release, it is safe to say that this story occurs sometime after The Grel Escape. As for The Galyari, they are portrayed as the villains at first, perverting Greco’s bloodline but it becomes more complicated than that as we learn that they are trying to create the ultimate warrior to bring down their ‘Sandman’ and keep his incredible powers

n a leash. Ultimately though, it is Benny who does the most harm to the child, running off with it but unable to control its natural evolution.

Forward manages to explore Bernice’s emotional connection to the Galyari’s young without involving Peter at all. Like the best stories in this range, it allows us to see her character in a new light; astonishing really, considering how long she has been running now, but with a full gamut of human emotions to explore - motherhood being the latest - Benny continues to impress her audience.

Lisa Bowerman delivers another fantastic performance as Benny especially in some the more poignant scenes. A rollercoaster ride of highs and lows, this really is real lump in the throat material. Benny’s maternal instinct has never felt stronger and Peter is nowhere in sight. Her brother Robin's portrayal of Mordican (who previously appeared in The Sandman) is also terrific as they have the sort of chemistry that only siblings share, bitching at each other but enjoying their company too. Both Tracey Childs (Colditz, The Fires of Pompeii) and Steffan Rhodri (from both The Sandman and Dreamtime) also fare well.

The Bone of Contention is yet another brilliant tale for Benny. In fact, I dare say that is slightly better than the previous Galyari / Korshal stories that came before it. A definitive must.

The Relics of Jegg-Sau

This offering from Stephen Cole is certainly a surprising one. Following on from the preceding two seasons, which showcased a wide range of recurring classic Doctor Who monsters (ranging from the Ice Warriors to Daleks), who would've ever thought that one of the programme's most remembered one-off monsters would return here? Yes, it's the K-1

Robot that kicked off Tom Baker's seven year reign as the Doctor (well... not the same one, obviously!) Michael Kilgariff even makes his return to the Whoniverse thirty years after his role in the original Robot, and his robot voice hasn't changed a bit!

The story begins with Benny's ship being shot down while flying over the abandoned colony on the remote planet Jegg-Sau where she encounters two survivors: a calm father and his wayward, childlike sixteen year-old daughter. Lisa Bowerman delivers another great performance as Bernice, especially in her scenes with the Robot. Paul Shelley (from the 1982 fifth Doctor serial Four to Doomsday) and Katherine Holmes also deliver great performances as Ethan Caldwell and his daughter Elise (guest who're they're the descendents of...?)

The Relics of Jegg-Sau also has an intriguing framing device that sees Benny and the Robot discussing the action after the event. This really helps to build up the drama and give the action some depth. It also helps the story switch location convincingly without lots of characters going "Right, I'm in the dome now!" and "Now I'm outside" which unfortunately is the case with so many Big Finish stories.

Some parts of the story are somewhat weak though, such as the Robot getting its ideas of human values from a porn simulation; the Robot assembling its own colony with fake humans, reproducing itself over and over; and even the astonishing idea of the Robot allowing its robot humans to believe they are real so that they act real!

And so aside from some minor flaws, The Relics of Jegg-Sau is excellent addition to the season. The production is great and some of the scenes will take your breath away, the guest actors really giving fully charged performances. And whether the idea to use the

Robot was daft or not, they certainly had a successful stab and giving it a send-off far more dramatic and satisfying than the last episode of Robot did!

The Masquerade of Death

Season 5 of the Bernice Summerfield series concludes in a dark and uneven (uneven in

a good way) fashion with Steward Sheargold's Masquerade of Death. This surreal and excellent story kicks off with Benny and Adrian Wall finding themselves imprisoned within a crumbling palace in the Prison Season of Spring, complete with its imperious Queen and prissy, but rather sweet, AI Gaoler.

Surrealism is often a dangerous idea to mess about with unless you are absolutely sure of what you are doing. Doctor Who had its attempts and some were very successful because they threw some truly wacky ideas at the audience as though they were the norm – just look at The Celestial Toymaker, The Mind Robber or even Big Finish's 2004 eighth Doctor release The Natural History of Fear. Others, meanwhile, were less successful because the scripts weren’t completely committed to the way out concepts; far more interested in the drama of the situation than exploring the madness of what was being presented - take Kinda and The Happiness Patrol, for instance. What's great about The Masquerade of Death though is how it throws the listener in at the deep end, opening the story in its madcap environment with no explanation as to how Benny and Adrian got there. You are left with a huge question mark hanging over your head for the first half of the play, totally at a loss to understand how these two friends have come to be in such a playfully sadistic setting. And on top of that, of course, we also have some cryptic references concerning the events of Life During Wartime and Mark Michalowski’s then-upcoming Benny novel The Tree of Life.

Both Lisa Bowerman and Harry Myers give wonderful performances as Bernice and Adrian, especially in the scenes with Sunny Ormande's Queen of Spring and later with Joyce Gibbs' Spinster. Robin Sebastian steals the show though as the sadistic Player – he has already become one of my all time favourite audio baddies, thanks to his delicious line in acidic put downs! I should also say that John Ainsworth is fast becoming one of my favourite Big Finish directors, as every time that he turns up on the schedules there is a little something extra in the production (particularly when compared to those with Gary Russell at the helm).

In a nutshell, The Masquerade of Death is a fantastic way to close Season 5; sheer gold from beginning to end!

Silver Lining

December 2004 saw Big Finish contribute another CD freebie to Doctor Who Magazine, this time featuring two stories: one featuring Bernice Summerfield (Silver Lining), and the other UNIT (The Coup).

The Benny story, starts off with our heroine asked to investigate the remains of an ancient civilisation. But as she digs deeper into the mystery, Benny discovers that Tysir IV is not

quite as dead as she’d been told...

This tale sees Benny encountering the Cybermen for the first time, though she will of course encounter them at least once more in the following season’s Crystal of Cantus. Interestingly though, this release sees the final use of the ‘Season 5’ theme.

Colin Brake’s story feels like a more or less a straight rehash of the 1967 second Doctor serial Tomb of the Cybermen, sans Cybermats. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the dialogue between Lisa Bowerman’s Benny and Nicholas Briggs’ Lynton (no not Lytton!) is atrocious, as is the wanton reference to the Doctor.

Nevertheless, whilst it may not be the great, like the earlier Buried Treasures freebie years earlier, Silver Lining is certainly worth a listen, and might even prove a guilty pleasure.

Kory Stephens has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All 'Bernice Summerfield' images on this site are copyrighted to Big Finish Productions and are used solely for promotional purposes.