Plum Pudding Reviews

The Ferryman stands in shadow and waits.  The Ferryman giggles, hungers and hates. The Ferryman comes to carry away -  All who behold the crown and disobey. The Crown by Jonathan Barnes I really like The Crown because I love a good old story that's primarily about atmosphere, but in truth I cannot deny that The Crown is a horror story that is hardly scary in any manner. I know, I know, that may seem kind of cruel and a cheap shot to make, but in earnest, I am a really easy person to scare the pants off of. Too much of an anxiety person really. Most Torchwood episodes scare me. And while this is spooky - It's not scary, and there's a decisive difference. Mostly The Crown is a story that sort of loses itself as it goes on. It could be a lot shorter, especially since it lends itself to a short story structure of the Queen telling us a story about how she got a crown. It has a short story mindset in a way - Victoria talks about events in that sort of way. She's like "O...

"Lads! Lads! Lads!"   Rhys & Ianto's Excellent Barbeque by Tim Foley I really hesitate saying too much about Rhys & Ianto's Excellent Barbeque because it's certainly one of those audios where if you discuss too much of it in a review space you do tend to spoil the entire reason it exists. Rhys & Ianto's Excellent Barbeque has a point to it, and it's very good at it's point, but if you say too much about it's point, then the whole sort of effect of it can go slightly sideways. Indeed, that's really kind of the point with these Torchwood two-handers. The Torchwood range by necessity often makes do with rather small casts and this Excellent Barbeque is no different. It's got a very small cast, so small it has to use dirty tricks to make the story even make sense with only three actors. I like dirty tricks, dirty tricks are fun, but the tale can sometimes border on the high concept, with one actor playing two vastly different charac...

  "That Monkey was just one extrusion of the multi-dimensional N-Form." The Three Monkeys by James Goss  There are certain writers I think understand Torchwood absolutely perfectly - Joseph Lidster, Tim Foley, Gareth David Lloyd, Guy Adams - chief of all of which is James Goss. The man does not miss. He can write about around anything at all really. You could tell him to write a Torchwood story about Ianto's childhood pony and he'd probably nail it out of the park. He's like that. The Three Monkeys feels like a story almost deliberately written to test that theory. It's a story about a magical alien monkey that sends out waves of luck. Sheer shitpostery.  The Monkey doesn't matter, no, what matters is the characters, and the little human interactions they have throughout. The Three Monkeys really rewards your attention that way - from a bit about stealing tin roofing, to even offhand dialogue coming up to help explain the plot, one of the main words I'...

  Torchwood Believe Now, this may just be me, but if I were in charge of doing a set where I had the five original crew back for some episodes, I'd probably not do what Guy Adams has done. It's another set of the miniseries format, which can work very well for Torchwood (Children of Earth, Soho, Before the Fall) and it can also not (Miracle Day, Titan Comics). But most times it does indeed work, so I wasn't exactly apprehensive going into Believe. Just sort of wishing it was another thing.   I've always been sort of weird in my preference for the average day episodes. I'm the only person I know who's favorite television season of Torchwood is series two. Believe is Torchwood on audio's biggest event set - it's the original five characters interacting again for the first time since 2008! On paper - Believe itself is very different from what it sounds like, and indeed, like The Torchwood Archive, it does indeed sort of separate all the characters into sepa...

  The Angel of Scutari by Paul Sutton I've long voiced my exceeding irritation at the Hex arc's repetitive war stories, and this is probably because I generally don't like war stories. War is hell, and something to be avoided and it's very bad, so naturally you're going to have stories that rake you through the mud with the soldiers and what not, that's the obvious route to take, and you know, that's really a very sore thing for me. I can't help but dislike them because so many of them feel like each other too. It's worse if it's the opposite and the story embraces and glorifies war, so you can't go in the opposite, and goddamn, I really don't like war stories, and I think that's been a big damper on the Hex arc for me in general, every story either being a war or Orwell's 1984 or a haunted house where a bunny cuts out your eyes.  However, while I am a big fan of fun in my Doctor Who, I can usually accept something that's damn...

"The Mara is in all of us, deep in our minds. In our darkest thoughts, that’s where it started. Some people call it a demon, but that’s too simple. It’s about temptation." The Cradle of The Snake by Marc Platt Comparing almost anything to Kinda and Snakedance is sort of always going to come out a bit flabby. Some say that Kinda itself is the alltime classic that can never be compared to, but in earnest, I've always loved Snakedance just the slight bit more - it may be slightly more "normal" but it is in a way that makes it's more disturbing and insane elements more shocking. On the contrast, you can take this sort of direction a bit too far. Snakedance would be rubbish if it was completely the corridor stylings of Classic Who, and while The Cradle of The Snake certainly has it's moments that take it higher than some other Main Range stories to be certain, especially the entirety of Part One, I find that just generally much of it is not the kind of direct...

  This is it! The Hour of the Hollow Men! Torchwood Soho Ashenden [Torchwood Soho Ashenden is a serial where each part builds upon the previous parts extensively. Unlike Parasite, where you could get by in vague terms, It is next to impossible to review each episode without spoiling the previous. I recommend fully listening to Ashenden before reading this review.] Ashenden is the second Torchwood Soho set and honestly, it's another banger. It's hard to predict that considering we've only had two sets of the range so far, but Ashenden displays the clear pattern that the series has while being wonderfully unique. What Ashenden is, is a very smart utilization of a very different side of the Torchwood Soho cast. While Norton is still as important, Parasite was very much Lyme's story, with Lizbeth and Andy in auxiliary roles. Andy didn't show up until episode three of Parasite, yet he's in five out of six episodes of Ashenden and is honestly the main protagonist. Liz...

  The End of the Beginning by Robert Valentine And so it comes to a close. The Main Range began in 1999 with a very ambitious and poorly executed little audio called The Sirens of Time. I don't hold it that much against Big Finish - it was their first Doctor Who audio at all, and they were a very very small production company at the time. It's a silly thing to look back on - there's some pretty abysmal sound editing, and you had even majestic actors like Maggie Stables incoherently babbling in a Russian accent. This would be all fine and dandy, and I still forgive it quite a lot - until you look at Big Finish's first output as a company, the Bernice Summerfield audio drama "Oh No It Isn't!" which is still to this day an extraordinary and exceedingly well put together listen with next to no flaws. So on second thought, no, I don't begrudge The Sirens of Time much at all.  The End of the Beginning is essentially the Sirens of Time's mirror, the exact...