Big Finish Audio Drama #78, 2006
This adventure is so ridiculous and the music is just so overdone that if I could give it zero jelloids, I would. Maudlin and trite dialog as well as music that makes it overly dramatic in all the wrong places. I just can’t stand this audio. Who is Maxi Miller? Don’t care. The Doctor’s epilogues just tend towards the overly dramatic that really doesn’t make me feel anything for the adventure. The only spooky bit was just having Emily reanimated by the evil under the pier. And the following excerpt was taken from www.wikipedia.com, the article about Max Miller:
In real life, he was completely unlike his stage persona, quite bourgeois, almost puritan, not allowing any bad language in the dressing-rooms. At home, he lived in deep privacy, devoted to his surprisingly posh wife, and fond of keeping parrots. He was also famously mean, except for his donations to blind charities. (He’d been temporarily blinded in the trenches and never knew if he’d recover his sight.) But these were kept strictly secret. Apart from that, his only act of generosity would be an occasional sixpence to a lad in the street, to fetch him some more parrot-food.
It doesn’t even match his personality in the audio! Ugh. He was deeply private? Oiy vey. The more I look, the worse it looks. Okay, wikipedia is not the end-all of information, to be sure, but apparently he’s a national treasure for the British and they know him well. Maybe he’s like a British Lenny Bruce? Being American I don’t know that much about British history so there are always interesting people and characters to find out about in these audios. Just perhaps not in such a random, haphazard fashion! The actual action progresses from point A to point B to point C in at least a relatively normal fashion. But it’s not cohesive and despite it being the “height of the summer season,” there aren’t many people about. Just a disappointing mishmash of adventures.
Colin Baker and Maggie Stables
writer: Robert Ross
director: G-Russell