The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Professor Bernice Summerfield

"Proud fact: my people will master time travel. Sad and ashamed fact: they will use it to steal Peter…"

While it seems incredible to think that The Grel Escape is the twentieth release in the Professor Bernice Summerfield series, marking the start of its fifth season, it seems even more amazing that it's the first time Jacqueline Rayner has scripted an original Benny play. After all, she was behind five of the novel adaptations that launched the audio series as well as penning two of the most memorable novels in Big Finish's ill-fated book range for the character - both of which dealt which huge events for Benny which culminated in the birth of her son, Peter, in The Glass Prison (2001). After her two acclaimed Doctor Who scripts, it seems only right she deserves a crack at Benny on audio too.

Rayner admits in her author notes that she didn't want to put herself or Benny through another big emotional storyline and so her intent in The Grel Escape was to write something much lighter. Given the last time we heard Benny was during the Fifth Axis occupation of the Braxiatel Collection, something more fun should have been an astute move but Rayner's decision to pay homage to what she describes as "Doctor Who's silliest adventure of all time" as inspiration is rather questionable.

As the back cover blurb insinuates with its talk of frightening festivals, deadly deserts, inaccurate robot doubles and strangely accented tourists, the Doctor Who story in question is 1965's The Chase, which marked the third time the Doctor did battle with the deadly Daleks in a madcap chase through time and space as they sought to destroy him and his companions. Rather than taking this basic idea of a hunt through time in a number of different locations - as Paul Cornell and Caroline Symcox did successfully in Seasons Of Fear (2002) - Rayner is more heavily indebted towards the original serial as she has taken many of its set pieces and remoulded them into the context of the Benny series, making this feel less like a homage and more like a total comedy remake.

An area which has been consistently overlooked in the Benny audios has been her home life with Peter, which is often dispensed with so she can be sent out to some exotic location to have the same type of adventure she's been having since 1997, when Virgin launched their original spin-off novel range. The combined story of Life During Wartime and Death And The Daleks brought these together and Rayner is aware of how this oversight has come about before and combines Benny's parental role with that of eternal adventurer as it is Peter that begins the chase of The Grel Escape when he activates the Time Rings given to him by Jason Kane, on the unsavoury grounds that he wanted to show him some genuine twentieth century funfairs and zoos.

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

Lack of originality is the play's biggest problem, as while the Benny audio stories have often paid tribute to Doctor Who through old monsters or implicit recognition of its origin, it has never gone so far as regurgitate its plots in their entirely. Once the listener becomes aware of how closely Rayner is following The Chase it becomes easy to anticipate what will happen next. While she doesn't blindly copy Terry Nation's story, the similarities are clear and it dictates that much of the humour will be similarly obvious. As soon as the escapers land in the arid desert of Egypt, you just know they'll discover a Grel wheezing and groaning as it burrows its way up from beneath the sand. But it doesn't stop there as Rayner seems to have a checklist of the set pieces of The Chase which have to be parodied - so we get the "Festival of Piranha" where something nasty lurks in the ghost train, they encounter mythic figures in the realm of the human mind, discover ridiculous robot doubles whose mission is to "infiltrate and steal", visit the top of a famous landmark where a tourist can mistake Benny and the Grel for Hollywood people making a film as well as an alien-based explanation for a famous disappearance (although unlike The Chase, there is debate whether the mysterious disappearance here actually happened) and you can get the idea. There's even a scene paying tribute to an aspect of The Daleks' Master Plan (or The Chase II: Chase Faster as its middle section might as well be called) thrown in for free! While one or two of these parodies in isolation combined with something fresh could have thrived, the sheer volume of revised scenes from The Chase gives the impression that this is a derivative piece lacking its own creativity. The best spoofs are those that lampoon serious stories, so by making fun of a story ("Doctor Who's silliest adventure of all time") which no one took seriously in the first place seems rather inane.

Although the plot of The Grel Escape may lack the ingenuity that typified Rayner's previous Doctor Who audios, it shares their excellent dialogue which proves to be its saving grace and is certainly helped by the choice of the Grel ("the most comedy of all villains") to fill the role of chasing villains. First appearing in Paul Cornell's novel Oh No It Isn't! (1997), they are a marvellous creation with their insane quest for new facts and their tendency to state the obvious, preceded with an analysis of the quality of its fact such as "Very bad fact! There is a high probability you may have killed me," which make them extremely amusing for both their attitude and their ineptness. Their inclination to take everything literally provides another opportunity for comedy like where Benny tells one of the Grel to tell her a fact she doesn't know and he replies by informing her of the Sultan of Granix's favourite colour. The inclusion of Sophia to accompany Benny in the chase provides the most inspired decision of the play and Julia Houghton delivers an outstanding performance. While 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. Perhaps the play's finest moment is Sophia's classic deadpan reaction to Jason's cry of "Up yours, squid for brains!" to the chasing Grel.

While The Grel Escape is undeniably undemanding, Rayner's writing - and this is especially true of her last audio play, the extraordinary Doctor Who And The Pirates - can use this in tandem with darker themes to create emotional drama with a deceptively light touch. Despite her intent to keep this story silly, she can't resist adding a little depth to it through Benny and Jason's parental fears regarding Peter. While Benny's worries revolve around who Peter will become, which is embodied by the way she acts in response to the acts that end the chase, Jason's are the more unusual and show his vulnerability as he fears that he's being pushed out of his relationship with Benny due to the fact that he is not Peter's father and so he's desperate to try and share Peter by trying to occupy the parental role. By showcasing Jason's determination to ensure Peter has a better childhood than he did, Rayner can subtly remind the listener of the hardships he endured as detailed in his introductory story, the novel Death And Diplomacy (1996) by Dave Stone. This desire to provide for Peter demonstrates Jason's compassion but his determinedness has clouded his judgement as he cannot see how irresponsible it is to give powerful artefacts such as the Time Rings to Peter. The tension between Benny and Jason here is clear and is indicative of the fact that neither is ready to accept each other back in the way they did when they were married.

While the final confrontation does (largely - the manner of the escapees departure is borrowed) mark the end of the allusions to The Chase - thankfully there's no attempt to steal the thunder of next year's Doctor Who story The Juggernauts with a premature reappearance of the Mechanoids - it does signal a very abrupt change in tone as Rayner opts to end the threat of the Grel in a fierce manner as the Time Rings' effect Peter's growth and sees the trailing Grel brutally killed off. Despite this development, we're eventually spared the terrible old soapish cliché of having an inconvenient child suddenly growing up instantly but the way in which the chase is ended provides a downbeat conclusion that is severely at odds with the fluffiness of the rest of the play particularly since there is no noticeable progression in tone towards the darkness, which means the effect is extremely jarring and unsatisfying.

The regulars are on entertaining form even though Houghton steals most of the scenes she features in. Special credit must go to Daniel Hogarth for providing not only a diverse range of accents for the Grel, keeping the Big Finish tradition of regional voiced monsters alive and well, but for also successfully voicing most of the incidental characters. The only one of these that doesn't entirely convince is the generic football commentator but that's mainly because it feels as if he needs someone to play the dialogue off (a character in the style of Toby Longworth's pundit from Judge Dredd - The Killing Zone would have been absolutely ideal) as that's what made the similar scene in The Daleks' Master Plan work.

Up until the unheralded brutality of the ending, The Grel Escape is bright, breezy and fun. But it's all ultimately rather superficial as it is a play with little invention or originality of its own as Rayner adds little to the story she's paying tribute to. The Grel Escape is entertaining but unremarkable and when you consider the fantastic quality of her scripts for the Doctor Who audio series, it makes the disappointment of this story even more acute.