The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Professor Bernice Summerfield

"Gigamarket attracts more than it's fair share of paramilitary loonies. Anyone would think that capitalism was a dirty word!"

The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy may qualify as the most bizarre release in Big Finish's Professor Bernice Summerfield range to date. Writer Paul Ebbs has a very unique and outlandish style of writing, something emphasised by his Doctor Who novel The Book Of The Still, and he brings this to bear with full force here. Unfortunately, in deciding the tone of this adventure for Benny he can't seem to make up his mind whether this is going to be a madcap comedy or serious drama so we get an uneasy mixture of both, complete with awkward change twenty odd minutes in .

The story's premise is rather simple. Benny finds herself travelling to the planet Baladroon, where, ostensibly, she's going to exhume its famed Latrines - but the planet is home to the Gigamarket, the so called greatest shop in the galaxy, and she's more interested in how many shoes she can buy with Adrian Wall's swiped credit chip. But inevitably for Benny, she's arrived at the wrong time and soon finds herself caught up in a series of time anomalies effecting the Gigamarket and breaking down the walls between the human side of the planet and the one that contains the alien Bovarli…

In some respect, Ebbs' work is rather reminiscent of Dave Stone's novels in that it is full of a multitude of ideas, all writhing for attention. But in Stone's Benny audio, the following story in the third 'season' The Green-Eyed Monsters, he cuts down his ideas to give a much more focused story, Ebbs seems determined to delight in throwing in as many concepts as possible to create a bizarre, off-the-wall story. Consequently, we get a lot of sudden twists and turns which all feel very underdeveloped and convoluted. It is this imbalance in the story which results in there being a broadly comedic first twenty minutes before an extremely sudden shift into drama which comes across drastically immediate and breaks the flow of the story.

The fight between humour and drama here raises the interesting question of which approach works best here for Benny in the audio medium? Despite initially marketing the series with the tagline 'Science Fiction has never sounded so fun!', the most successful of Big Finish's releases have shown that Benny thrives best in an environment of dark, character based drama with the option of humour present without it overwhelming the script. Here, the opening of The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy leads the listener into the anticipation of a comedy story and the shift confounds their expectations. By doing this Ebbs has created an imbalance which makes the sudden shift to serious drama unsettling, but more importantly it undermines the listener's confidence in Ebbs ability as he doesn't seem to know what he wants to do with this tale.

Also notable is what the story doesn't do, and that is deal with the implications of what happened to Benny in her last appearance prior to this adventure, Jacqueline Rayner's novel The Glass Prison where she gave birth to her son, Peter. Given that her last audio appearance prior to this saw her heavily pregnant and that the actual birth took place in Big Finish's novel line, some sort of reflection upon this might have been called for (as indeed we get in The Green-Eyed Monsters). But aside from a couple of lines about how she's left the baby at home with its father, the Killoran builder Adrian Wall, Ebbs almost singularly evades this question. Aside from the fact that it gives the impression that Benny is acting irresponsibly by avoiding accepting the responsibility her new status as a mother gives her, it also highlights a problem of why give Benny the story the first place, if you're not going to do anything with it? A lot of the subsequent audio releases after this have also avoided the issue, and while there's the danger of turning the Benny series into some kind of galactic soap opera (especially when you consider the rivalry between Jason Kane and Adrian Wall and their feelings towards the baby) which I don't think anyone wants, but having taken this road Big Finish need to continue down it rather than trying to pretend it hasn't happened.

Lisa Bowerman brightens the story up with a lively performance. Benny's hitherto unexplored fetish for shoes borders on the obsessional, but Bowerman makes it believable through her convincing and confident display. She also shows great depth and substance in a scene towards the end of the play where she realises the Bovarli attacking them are only confused and frightened women and children members of the species and her reaction to Tarband's solution to this problem shows the strength of Benny's character perfectly.

David Benson shines amongst the guest cast as the obsequious Keelor, an Executive of the Gigamarket, who proceeds to show Benny around on her arrival. He provides an interesting outlet for the humour, relishing the lightness of Keelor's appearance yet he also demonstrates a more vulnerable side when strange things begin happening. Toby Longworth is one of Big Finish's most versatile voice artists and his performance here is no exception as he brings a villainous angle to the role and certainly makes the most of Joggon's unusual tendencies! Steven Wickham makes his first appearance as Benny's porter, Joseph, although he did play the very similar part of the Drone back in Walking To Babylon previously. It's not a particularly auspicious debut into Benny's audio world for a character whose roots go back to the novel of Oh No It Isn't! as the Time Anomalies ensure that he is malfunctioning throughout the story giving Wickham little to do except make silly noises.

The music for the story is typified by the use of a supermarket-music style version of the Big Finish Benny theme which is used both freely and liberally to the story's detriment. While it's very appropriate for the setting of the story, it soon becomes an irritant to the enjoyment of the story given the frequency that it is played. It's an old adage, but sometimes less is more and that's a statement which is certainly true here.

The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy is a bizarre and muddled story, which only occasionally shows flashes of inspiration. Much of the humour succeeds, but Ebbs doesn't strike a good enough balance to make the shift between the early comedy style and the more serious nature of the play during the later half. Ebbs has a lot of interesting ideas, but seems too easily distracted by trying to cram as many of them in as possible to develop them to their logical conclusion, leaving a lot of what this story tries to do appearing insubstantial. With a stronger sense of stability to the structure of the story, The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy could have been a triumph but as it is it remains an interesting curio; mildly diverting but ultimately not particularly satisfying. Ebbs' authorial voice is certainly unique though and this makes The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy stand as something unique as there isn't anything quite like it, but whether or not this is a good thing rather depends on the listener's own sensibility to the strangeness of Ebbs' world.