"Brave New Town"
by Jonathan Clements

The Autons are back! Brave New Town is the latest adventure for the Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller, written by Jonathan Clements, the first Big Finish audio play to feature the popular race of animated plastic creatures.

The TARDIS has arrived in Thorington, a small English village, in 2008. Except the villagers think it's perpetually September 1st 1991 - every day is a Sunday, the same Bryan Adams song has been at the top of the charts for as long as they can remember, and every evening the town's newspapers are collected so that they can be re-sold in the morning. What's really going on? And who are the sinister visitors whose patrols cover the village?

In the bonus interviews and the sleeve notes, the crew of this production explain why Big Finish have never done an Auton story before: they don't easily lend themselves to the audio medium. To get around this, Clements has done something very unconventional and unexpected with them, twisting the mythos in intriguing and inventive ways. His ideas are very good indeed, and this story certainly gives us a new perspective on the creatures, but it ultimately feels like a bit of a cheat. For much of this play, the Autons are just there - they're a part of the story, but it never feels as if they come to the fore. In trying to take them in a new direction, it's as if some of their potential has been wasted, and they never made the impact that I'd hoped for.

Autons aside, though, there's still a lot to enjoy in Brave New Town. The idea of the isolated village re-living the same day over and over again isn't hugely original, but it's tackled in a fresh and clever way, so the plot never feels particularly cliched. And whilst things rattle forwards with great speed (sometimes, this doesn't work, with several scenes that are just too short), the plot itself unfolds relatively slowly, making the play feel very much like a Pertwee-era mystery. It's spooky and tautly-written, without dragging or becoming excessively dark.

The legendary Derek Griffiths, the defining voice of children's television for many years, heads the guest cast as village resident Jason Taylor. He's absolutely superb, and his performance is one of the play's highlights. All his co-stars are equally impressive (Nick Wilton's sometimes-shaky accent as Karimov excepted), with leads Sheridan Smith and Paul McGann giving predictably strong performances.

The CD extras feature some nice clips of raw recording from the studio, but they mainly consist of generic interviews with the cast answering the same set of uninteresting questions. There are bits and bobs of entertaining stuff here, so the bonus material is worth a listen, but there's less of the polish and structure than we were treated to on the previous two discs.

(Oh, and hesitant as I am to admit it, the new version of the theme tune is starting to grow on me. It's not a patch on its predecessor, but it definitely improves with repeated listens.)

Brave New Town isn't quite as strong as the first two adventures of this season, but it's another terrific play, continuing the consistently good track record for this series.