Big Finish Reviews+ The Night Witches

Tony flies with the Witches.

The Early Adventures range of Doctor Who stories reaches right back to the show’s earliest years to create some stories in ways that perhaps have fallen out of favour in subsequent decades, but give them enough of a modern spin to let them intrigue 21^st century listeners.

The fourth series of these Early Adventures kicks off with a new story for Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor and his earliest Tardis crew, Polly, Ben and Jamie.

We’re not in supernatural territory here though – this is not Who Does Harry Potter or Rivers of London. The Night Witches, written by Roland Moore, is a pure historical story, with no aliens, no plots to take over the world – at least none from green, tentacled monsters from the planet Zog – just the genuine push and pull of human history, and the realisation that that’s plenty complicated enough, plenty dangerous enough, and very often plenty fatal enough a thing to go messing about with. The pure historical was baked into the DNA of Doctor Who right from the very beginning, as part of the show’s mission to educate its mainly young audience about historical subjects in an involving way. But kids are kids, and the pure historicals were less popular than the ‘Pow!-zap!-Exterminate!’ playground potential of the science fiction storylines, so they died out after Troughton’s first season in the Tardis.

Big Finish has revived them, and let the later Doctors get in on the purely historical action, but there’s something about the ‘black and white’ Doctors of the Early Adventures range that instinctively fits more with this kind of storytelling – not least because they’d died out before those later Doctors got their Tardis keys, so we’re not pre-trained to hear later Doctors in those stories.

The Night Witches lands the Tardis crew in wartime Russia, with Nazi tanks on the advance, and introduces us to the all-female bomber crew that earned themselves the Night Witch title for their slow, relatively silent bombing raids. To make up for its lack of alien threat, it does pull a sci-fi trope out of its bag though – Polly has an exact doppelganger in the poster-girl for the Witches, adding agreeably to the complications that abound and the potential plot-threads that are spun.

It’s fair to say that angle of the ‘two Pollys’ is needed in this story, which suffers from the precision with which it recreates some of the pure historical stories – by which we mean it spends a lot of time moving people from A-B and then a lot of time trying to move them back from B-A, only to run into complications. What this does is minimise the action elements in favour of allowing us to get to know and care about the period and its people – and in particular in this case, the group of exhausted, starving, intensely brave women who did what they could do to fight the threat of the Nazi war machine. But still, in The Night Witches, there are moments when perhaps a touch more plot wouldn’t go amiss. Moore’s script discovers the plotting button more distinctly towards the end, but even then – and rightly so – the plots that are hatched feel like desperation measures, of the kind you’d expect from a group of young, starving, exhausted, frayed-nerved people increasingly likely to never see another dawn. There’s that feeling of World War I, Somme-like desperation to do anything to avoid going over the top in some strands, and the blank-eyed slablike desperation to do anything that can help them win in some others. It’s all very evocative, and certainly it does the job of putting us in the mindset of the time and place and people we get to drop in on through the magic of the Tardis, but the lack of a particular in-story Big Bad means it can sometimes feel unfocused and scrappy and, to coin a phrase, ‘just one damned thing after another.’

That said, the performances throughout are very good. In particular, the Tardis team are on spectacular form, Anneke Wills rising to the occasion of having a distinctly Polly-centred story with a performance that prints the heart of her companion right on the memory of the listener. Elliot Chapman gets better every time he plays Ben, and here he’s more or less indistinguishable from the original article. And Frazer Hines…there are really too few words for the wonder of Frazer Hines, who not only continues to give us a Jamie as bright and bold and resourceful as ever he was, but also continues to send shivers down listeners’ spines with his intensely evocative take on the Patrick Troughton Doctor. It’s genuinely uncanny, and Moore in this story gives Hines a demented amount to do, not least having heated arguments with himself as the two characters he plays. The three main Night Witches we meet are agreeably distinct - Anjella Mackintosh gives Polly-double Tatiana Kregki a pragmatism that feels real, Wanda Opalinska makes commander Nadia Vasney a classic case of someone who’s been at war too long on too few rations and too little sleep, and Kristina Buikaite gives Lilya Grankin a sweet gaucheness that makes her the most appealing of the three.

The Night Witches is worth checking out, both as a tribute to the real women on whom the story is loosely based, and as a more interesting, richly characterised and female-driven story than many in the history of Doctor Who. If it doesn’t blast the fourth series of Early Adventures off into the stratosphere with a story that demands immediate and repeat re-listening, it does bring it down to Earth and give us an unblinking look at female bravery under extreme duress against the forces of Nazism. Given the world in which we find ourselves, that means The Night Witches is a story that feels unexpectedly appropriate in 2017.