Nick Scovell

As has been noted around the place, last Sunday was the forty-fifth anniversary of Doctor Who. Big Finish's commemoration is four one-act, 25-minute plays, each by a different author. False Gods takes the team to Howard Carter's excavation of the tomb known as KV45; Order of Simplicity sees them deal with a virus which reduces its victims' IQs to 45; Casualties of War takes us to Ace's mother and grandmother in Streatham on VE Day in 1945; and The Word Lord resolves it all in a Bad Wolf-style revelation. The final playlet seemed to me the strongest, playing with concepts of language as a reality of its own, and with Paul Reynolds as the eponymous villain seeming to channel David Tennant's Tenth Doctor occasionally. I enjoyed the other two historical plays, but was a bit underwhelmed by the second of the four. The same guest cast appears in the first and second plays, and a different guest cast in the third and fourth, but the characterisations (and accents) are very different, so it all works rather well.… (meer)