The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Professor Bernice Summerfield

"What on Earth was I doing last night to end up here?"

Oh No It Isn't! was a logical choice to begin Big Finish's range of audio stories featuring Professor Bernice Summerfield, as it was based upon the first original Benny New Adventure novel. As an adaptation of Paul Cornell's book, Jacqueline Rayner's script takes much of the original story and strips away the extraneous elements such as the main subplot and other aspects of the wider New Adventures universe, like the agents of the People for example, to make it a much more concentrated affair with Benny put firmly into the limelight, and little time before the main thrust of the story begins.

The listener is thrown into the story immediately with Benny conducting an excavation on the planet Perfecton, where its native civilisation died out over five thousand years ago. This has a two fold effect as it both introduces Lisa Bowerman as Benny, whilst establishing her character at the same time, as well as laying down concepts which will be important to the story later, such as the dangerous nature of the planetary system's star and the mysteries of the Perfecton society.

With a character who's featured in as many novels as Bernice Summerfield has, the casting of her becomes a key element to the success of how successful an audio adaptation will be. With Lisa Bowerman, Big Finish hit gold with an actress who can be as bold as necessary yet has a believable tender side to her too. Her range and the confident forthrightness she imbues Benny with are instantly appealing and she endears herself right away as she stands up for herself while telling her students of her chequered past, which is effective as it paints the background to her character.

Rayner's script also progresses at pace. The first ten minutes of the story, in effect, serve as a prologue to the main element of the story where Bernice finds herself in a world spawned by the genre of pantomime. The contrast between the normality and the pantomime world is emphasised clearly which makes the sudden change very satisfying in its dramatic impact. The presence of the Grel (a race of "vile, squid faced things" obsessed with discovering new facts) also makes the villains of the story more ambiguous as there are more candidates. The Grel themselves are a brilliant idea and their tendency to declare the facts they acquire ("Fact: we are breaking down the door!") provide the story with another layer of humour to work with.

Various pantomime story elements find their way into Oh No It Isn't and this miscellany is cleverly done as it's symptomatic of the whole problem that Benny faces without being too obvious about it, as the story elements she finds herself in are seeking a way to bring closure to themselves. One of the most appealing aspects is the fact that the characters, Benny in particular, have no clear idea that they are in a world created on pantomime principles and her attempts to rationalise it are a delight to hear, as is her joy where she realises that she's in a more tangible position than she believed.

Rayner's script is faithful in most respects to Cornell's original novel, but because pantomime is a genre that is performed, the storyline of Oh No It Isn't! sometimes is more effective here because it is being performed for the audio medium with the nuances and specific styling of pantomime brought out more clearly than the original text thanks to the acting of the cast.

As you would expect from pantomime, there's a lot of humour present in this story with much of it playing on the bawdy, innuendo filled type of dialogue that is often present in this type of adventure. The characters adopt the typical roles of the pantomime and thus James Campbell's Dame Candy in particular is the source of much saucy humour. But while the humour is obvious and forthright, it's never allowed to become the dominant force of the story as Benny's quest to discover what's truly happening is given the central focus and in this respect the balance between drama and comedy is struck well.

While Lisa Bowerman excels on her debut, she very nearly has the show stolen from beneath her by Nicholas Courtney, playing the role of Benny's pet cat Wolsey, who in the panto-world has become quite different to what she expected. Courtney is quite brilliant here, with his rich voice perfectly suited to the role of the now sentient, human-sized cat who is Benny's (or as Wosley sees her, Dick's) faithful and fearless companion on their quest to travel to London in order for Benny to become the new Lord Mayor. Demonstrating some impeccable comedic timing, Courtney purrs his way through the story with some fantastically dry deliveries of his innuendo filled lines yet also shows a more introspective side towards the end of the story when the truth of his life before the story began comes back to haunt him in touching manner.

While the rest of the cast performs well, only really Mark Gatiss, channelling Kenneth Williams heavily, as the Grand Vizier stands out from them. Accompanied by the hissing of the audience on his appearance, he makes an appealing villain-like figure throughout his appearances and his characters true nature comes as quite a surprise. Alistair Lock is good as the Grel Master too, although it does take a while to get used to how odd the Grel sound.

At one point when Benny realises what has happened to the crew of her ship, she states that the pantomime versions of them are all brief sketches of these people. While this works to a certain extent, the effect is lessened because of the brevity of the introductory scenes as some of the characters, namely Jayne Waspo, Captain Balsam and Lt. Prince, have only featured briefly before hand which means they are only briefly characterised in the first place, making their pantomime counterparts less effective caricatures than they might have been had a bit more preparation been made during the early part of the audio.

Oh No It Isn't! is an excellent production, which succeeds thanks to the inspired casting of Lisa Bowerman and Nicholas Courtney. It parodies the pantomime format brilliantly, leading to good use of the type of humour expected of this genre without being too heavy-handed about it whilst maintaining the need to tell an entertaining story at the same time. Massive fun.